On 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 […]
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Equipment failure
In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working with one of our technicians tracking down what has been going wrong with one of the experiments we get our third year physics students to do. It’s on Brownian Motion. Specifically, analyze the movement of small particles suspended in water by scattering of laser light. By […]
Continue readingThe shortest distance between two points
I remember as a student being presented with the proof that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line (at least, on a 2 dimensional flat surface). Although it’s almost blatantly obvious, it can be formally proved through Calculus of Variations. However, the quickest route between two points is not necessarily a straight […]
Continue readingHow to cheat aging
It’s ‘Wellness Focus’ week here, and there are all kinds of wonderful activities going on to promote health among the employees of the University of Waikato. I’ve just finished a REV class, which has finished me off for the whole afternoon, I think. Yesterday, I had a free health check – where my blood pressure, […]
Continue readingMysterious power generation
One consequence of being a physicist is that you can’t go anywhere without seeing physics calculations that need doing. I’ve just been to our library hunting down books on the medical technique of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), which was an interesting exercise in itself, since one textbook I found also has a chapter on homeopathy. […]
Continue readingThe most interesting “photo” I’ve ever taken
This week I’ve started my Study Leave with a short visit to the University of Otago in Dunedin. Today, amongst other things, I had a quick tour of one of the atomic physics labs there. Recently, Mikkel Andersen’s group has managed to trap a single atom of rubidium. It’s quite a complicated process – you […]
Continue readingA solution to the world’s energy problems?
A student of mine has drawn my attention to this article. (Full article in Physical Review Letters here, a more accessible summary of it in Physics World here.) It describes a light emitting diode (LED) that has a greater than 100% efficiency at converting electrical power to light. That is, put 30 picowatts of electrical […]
Continue readingQuantum interference
I’ve just put an order in for a new piece of lab equipment – an experimental set-up that will allow students to carry out the two-slit, one-photon experiment. This is one of the ‘classic’ experiments of quantum mechanics – showing just how strangly small things behave. Interference patterns are commonly observable when you have two […]
Continue readingRena: Where’s the physics?
On Tuesday night I attended a very informative and lively discussion at Cafe Scientifique on the Rena disaster. (For readers not in NZ, the Rena is the container ship that has been stuck on Astrolabe reef off the coast of Tauranga for the last few weeks, shedding oil and containers into the sea – see […]
Continue readingThe varied world of physics
It 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 […]
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