I was talking with a PhD student yesterday (not one of my students) about her research. She's well into her second year here and things are generally going fine, but she feels she's a bit stuck. What should she do next? She's happy to do her experiments, and work through the analyses of the results, […]
Continue readingTag: experiment
Torsional pendulums and earthquakes
The shaking here in Hamilton is hardly on the scale of Seddon and Wellington, but it does mean my students aren’t going to get anything meaningful out of their measurement of the gravitational constant this afternoon. The Cavendish experiment uses a sensitive torsional pendulum, whose motion is currently more dominated by ground movement than by […]
Continue readingGravity goes downwards
Yesterday afternoon I was engaged in a spot of DIY – putting up some shelves. Even for me, as someone who takes to DIY like a duck to mountaineering, it’s a fairly simple task, and I’m pleased to say that I got there without the ‘do’ in DIY turning into ‘destroy’. With the help of […]
Continue readingMy equipment doesn’t work…
We’re three weeks into our ‘B’ semester here. One of the papers I’m teaching (just on the fringes of) is our main first year physics paper. When I say ‘on the fringes of’, it means I’m supervising one laboratory session a week. It’s good to keep in contact with what’s going on at first year […]
Continue readingA stonking good start to our experimental physics paper. Not.
Just a couple of hours ago, I was thinking that I really need to do another blog entry for the week, but (a) can’t think what to do it on and (b) don’t have time to do it because I have a lab class for the afternoon. Well, the events in the lab class have […]
Continue readingQuantum mechanics: Reality is back
With an exam imminent, I’ve had a queue of students outside my door wanting help with their quantum mechanics. This semester, they’ve come across the Schrodinger equation and the wavefunction for the first time and, unsurprisingly, some are struggling to grasp it. "But what IS the wavefunction?", they say. "How do you derive the Schrodinger […]
Continue readingDon’t cook the baby
Last week we had a new oven installed. Our old el-cheapo one that came with the house was never in Karen’s good books. Small, dirty, incapable of getting to a high temperature and generally giving the impression that it was about to die at any moment. Indeed, it did a couple of Christmases ago – […]
Continue readingThe bubble raft and lattice defects
After doing the washing up a few days ago, I returned to the sink to find a raft of bubbles had formed on the surface of the water. All the bubbles were roughly equal size, and they had aligned themselves into a close-packed lattice, as the photo shows. (Sorry about the quality of the photo […]
Continue readingThe sleep machine
I came across this paper while doing a bit of reading about the applications of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). A TMS machine applies pulses of magnetic field to the brain. The rapidly-varying magnetic field induces an electric field (Faraday’s law) and this in turn influences neural activity (but just how and where is an open question). A […]
Continue readingThe amazing vacuum microwave
Happy Easter everyone. Sorry for lack of blog activity – lots of marking has been building up that I’ve needed to get through. Yesterday we experienced the vacuum-packing ability of a clip-container in a microwave. In this case, it was being used to cook some vegetables for Benjamin’s dinner. The veges were placed in the […]
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