This morning I’ve been having a quick look through some documentation from The Ministry of Education on proposed changes to NCEA Level 1 Science. For those not familiar with the NZ secondary education system, a typical student would complete NCEA level 1 at the end of year 11. In this regard, it’s broadly similiar to […]
Continue readingA highlight of the recent NZ Institute of Physics conference was the Dan Walls medal talk given by Matt Visser. Matt has been working on general relativity. That's not desparately unusual for a physicist, but Matt has been successful in working on some of the crazier aspects of relativity and getting it published – wormholes, […]
Continue reading….Well, what do you think? No surprises this year. Francois Englert and Peter Higgs have been awarded this year's Nobel Prize in physics for the theoretical 'discovery' of the Higgs mechanism. The citation, however, I find very interesting: for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass […]
Continue readingAn interesting problem to ask students to think about is this: Write down a definition of ‘left’ (as in the opposite of right). It’s something every adult knows, but how do you define it. There’s little wonder that children take a long time to grasp which is left and which is right. One might say: […]
Continue readingOn Monday evening this week I managed to do a bit of time travelling while driving back home. I was driving back through one of those heavy showers that have been marauding around the place recently, with windscreen wipers full pelt on a rather wet road. However, these showers don’t last for very long, and […]
Continue readingBreaking news…(ish)…Well, only a few hours old… Maybe the faster-than-light neutrinos are caused by a dodgy connection. Einstein can sleep easy again.
Continue readingThis morning I was over in Tauranga giving a talk to the Continuing Education group (i.e. ‘older’ people) on the CERN – Gran Sasso neutrino experiment. (For those interested, you should be able to download the full paper on this work here.) My philosophy is that no piece of work is too difficult to explain […]
Continue readingWell, CERN was certainly twittering away last night, though, to be fair, I’m glad I didn’t stay up for the press conference. Some things are worth trading in your sleep for, such as an eclipse of the moon (occasionally) or other astronomical event, an Ashes test, a Royal Wedding (just about), but, I’m afraid, not […]
Continue readingIt was a very interesting day at the NZ Institute of Physics conference. I learned about some of the physics experiments done at the South Pole, how to trap, observe and count atoms (and that high school physics teachers who tell their students that you can’t see atoms need to update their knowledge), some results […]
Continue readingThere have been recent murmurings that Cold Dark Matter (CDM) is in trouble. Dark matter is stuff that is hypothesized to make up a fair chunk (23%-ish) of what is in the universe (as opposed to normal matter – the stuff we ‘see’ and experiment with – which may make up only 5% what’s in […]
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