It’s that time of year when school students become seriously focused on exams. This year has been messy for student learning, and has affected some students more than others, but the NCEA external assessments and the Scholarship exams are going ahead pretty-much as normal. I’ve taken some interest in the Scholarship Physics exams over the […]
Continue readingTag: light
Bad light stopped play
One of the top challenges for physics in the modern era, along with Climate Change and explaining Dark Energy, has to be fixing the problem of bad light*. (I’m talking cricket – what else?) It’s a quintessentially English problem. It’s not raining, the pitch is perfectly playable, the spectators (COVID-19 notwithstanding) are enjoying themselves, but […]
Continue readingMucky rain
While the south of New Zealand has been struggling with too much rain in recent days, here in the north we are so very short of it (though Saturday’s forecast looks promising). Basically, we have had almost none since Christmas. As someone who relies on rain to wash the car, this means my car is […]
Continue readingColour vision
We’ve known for a while that child number 1 (male) is red-green colour blind. This comes as no surprise – with his maternal grandfather being the same. The genes responsible lurk on the X-chromosome. That means mother is a carrier of red-green colour blindness, and child number 1 had a 50:50 chance of picking up […]
Continue readingAmazing lenses
There is no denying it. I am middle-aged. The latest evidence is the progressive-lens glasses. I had tried to put off getting these for as long as possible (warning to you younger readers – they are not cheap!) but it was just getting too difficult without them. We pretty-well take for granted good vision, but […]
Continue readingGravitational Waves
The big breaking physics news is the detection of gravitational waves. These waves are distortions in space-time, caused by a large mass doing something spectacular (two colliding black holes in this case) that propagate across the universe and create tiny changes in space when they reach us. The commentary here describes what goes on. Essentially, […]
Continue readingA light puzzle
Here's a puzzling photograph that Hans Bachor showed me at the end of the NZ Institute of Physics conference last week. It comes from his public lecture on lasers a week ago. And we don't have the answer to it, so maybe you can enlighten us (pun intended). The photo is of a demonstration of […]
Continue readingHigh-tech, Low-tech, planetary observations.
First the low-tech: The conjunction of Venus (the brighter one) and Jupiter as recorded by my very lousy cellphone camera just after sunset yesterday. Now the high-tech: A day before that Pluto occulted a star. It moved in front of the star, rather like an eclipse. The significance of the event was that it allowed […]
Continue readingThe equation of time strikes again
Some of us are rather looking forward to getting to 22 June. That's when the days get longer again. Yes, the reality is that no-one's really going to notice much difference for a while, but it's encouraging to think that the days will be getting lighter again, if only by a little bit. Don't confuse […]
Continue readingA blatant plug for the NZIP2015 conference
There's no hiding my conflicts of interest here. I'm on the New Zealand Institute of Physics 2015 conference organizing committee. I'm also the NZIP treasurer. And I'm a staff member at the host organization. So, to contribute to the New Zealand physics community's biennial event in Hamilton on 6 – 8 July, click on this […]
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