Yesterday afternoon I had to call on my car’s anti-lock braking system (ABS). For reasons best known to its driver, a car pulled out of a side road right in front of me while I was driving home after work, and I needed to stop in a hurry. I rather think the car behind me […]
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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 readingWhat is climate science?
In the last few weeks, I’ve been working with some colleagues at the University of Waikato to construct a first-year course introducing Climate Change Science, with a bit of a NZ focus. This would be suitable for students of all backgrounds (not just science students although those would likely be the majority). It’s not that […]
Continue readingBIG idea physics
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 readingSnicko uncertainty (or why Ross Taylor got away with it)
As I write this, Joe Root is firmly entrenched at Seddon Park and is moving steadily on towards another double-hundred. I was there on Saturday, and can report that the pitch is as flat as an optical bench, and even I fancy my chances of getting three figures against any bowling attack on this surface. […]
Continue readingVortices and the end of Nemo
Well, that was a most unsatisfying end to a novel. After building up to an exciting conclusion, Nemo decides he’s had enough of wreaking revenge on his enemies* and plunges The Nautilus into the Moskenstraumen (Maelstrom) whirlpool off the Lofoten Islands, Norway, where, presumably, there is no return. (Or is there? I note there’s a […]
Continue readingIf you can’t measure it, does it exist?
In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been busy preparing for our summer paper on Science Communication. Looking for something amusing about ‘risk’ in science, I came across this neat xkcd.com cartoon about why so many people come knocking on my door (or phoning me, or emailing me) desperately wanting me to spend hundreds of […]
Continue readingThe bed of nails
It’s always fun to see this demonstrated. Here’s Haggis Henderson, at the recent NZ Institute of Physics conference in Christchurch, not only lying on a bed of nails but having a teenager stand on him too. He survived the experience, though I can’t vouch for what his back looked like afterwards. The bed of nails […]
Continue readingJigsaw puzzles
Last night I completed a project that’s been going for the last three months – a 1000 piece jigsaw. This one was pretty but particularly fiendish – being a street map of Paris. There’s not a lot of variation from piece to piece – green background with white streets, with limited clues. There are river […]
Continue readingSycamore seeds and wind turbines
At the recent NZ Institute of Physics conference in Dunedin we heard about a wide range of different physics topics -measuring electrical forces; atomic frequency combs; why a highly gendered physics class is not a good thing and measuring forces with your phone. One very simple but thought-provoking presentation was by Tim Molteno – on […]
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