I made the brave decision yesterday to attend a seminar in the Computer Science department. I used to like computer science as a teenager – I was one of those geeks who wrote their own computer games – but in latter times I’ve stuck with the physics and used computers begrudgingly as a means of doing my […]
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Putting your life into perspective
I came across these blog entries from David Spiegelhalter at the weekend from a statistician. In his posts he talks about quantifiying the risk from various activities (even just living) using the terminology of the ‘microlife‘ and the ‘micromort‘. The microlife is defined as 30 minutes – very approximately a millionth of the remaining life expectancy of […]
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 readingGuilty of order-of-magnitude neglect
I’ve often commented on the failure of students to apply common sense when calculating physical quantitites. For example, perhaps I ask them to calculate or estimate the pressure exerted by a car tyre on the road (with the car attached to the tyre) and they punch their figures into a calculator and get 10.4 pascals. […]
Continue readingDelayed feedback, oscillations and the police
This story from Yahoo is hilarious – about a policeman who chased himself for 20 minutes. In a nutshell, a CCTV operator sees a man acting suspiciously, unaware that it is in fact a plain clothes policeman. He radios through to the police, who pass the message on to their nearest policeman to the scene, who is, of […]
Continue readingAre you a realist or a relativist?
A colleague of mine in the Faculty of Education here at Waikato has drawn my attention to an elegantly titled paper by Andreas Quale: "On the Role of Mathematics in Physics" Science and Education (2011), 20:359-372, for those of you who like references. The paper is about the way mathematics relates to physics, highlighting the […]
Continue readingA physicist’s lament
Yesterday I visited Auckland to interview a few people who work with physics in their industry-based jobs. This was part of my small research project on the role of maths within physics, which I’ve talked about earlier. One of the people I interviewed gave some really fascinating responses, perhaps in part because he had grown […]
Continue readingWas that a Higgs I just saw?
Well, 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 readingElections and antimatter
Reading opinion polls in the papers tends to cause despair and hilarity in roughly equal measure. Despair, not because my current favourite party might be nose-diving in the polls, rather because of the journalists scant regard for statistics, and hilarity for the way a story is built up where no story exists. A really, really […]
Continue readingBending of beams
The ceiling in our new house is held up by seven large, curved, steel beams. There are also steel beams holding up parts of the upper floor. These beams are I-beams – so-called because they resemble the capital letter ‘I’ in shape (except they don’t in a sans-serif format as this blog gets published in.) […]
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