Just occasionally, I have a crazy thought regarding a physics demonstration. This is one that I’m thinking about inflicting on my third year electromagnetism class. We’ve been discussing the way electromagnetic waves travel (or rather, do not travel) through electrical conductors. Basically, conductors allow electric currents to flow in response to an applied electric field (in simple terms […]
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ET home phone
This month’s feature article in PhysicsWorld is a plea by well-known science (particularly physics) writer Paul Davies to relaunch (or rather, expand) the search for extra-terrestrial life. The Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has been around for nearly fifty years, focusing on analyzing data from radio telescopes. But Paul Davies thinks there are other places […]
Continue readingMy kind of blog
This is what I like to see – a fellow blogger (Brian Clegg) extolling the virtues of physics blogging and tweeting. What’s interesting about Brian’s entry is that he talks about how a blog can trigger a discussion that increases the quality of the original posting. Like peer review for a scientific paper, but informal, […]
Continue readingFallstreak cloud
Those of you who check out the NZ metservice website frequently, may remember last week’s ‘photo-of-the-week’: It’s of fallstreak cloud, and this example was spotted by my mother-in-law, Barbara Seccombe, off the coast from New Plymouth recently. (Photo credit to my father-in-law, Wally Seccombe, used with permission). It’s not something you see everyday, so I asked my brother […]
Continue readingHeat transfer within edible objects
The veggie-juicer in our kitchen will happily take fruit, such as apples and oranges. Apparently, in the case of the orange, it works best if the fruit is cold (but not frozen) throughout. So here’s the question my wife asked me last week: If I have an orange at room temperature, and want to cool it […]
Continue readingTectonic Plates and Angular Momentum
As we know, the earth spins on its axis once every twenty four hours. (Well, actually it doesn’t, but we’ll leave aside the difference between solar and sidereal days for the purpose of this entry). The spinning earth posses something we physicists call angular momentum. It is the ‘spinning’ version of linear momentum; the latter […]
Continue readingFundamental Constants and the problem of gravity
A few years ago I wrote, along with a collaborator, a guide to uncertainty analysis (commonly and misleadingly referred to as error analysis) in university physics. Yesterday I had a quick look at this, to see if I should update anything for our new bunch of students. As part of this, I had a look […]
Continue readingScience research works
I was pleased to read in February’s PhysicsWorld that a spin-off company started by Henning Sirringhaus and Richard Friend (the latter being one of my old university lecturers) has launched an exciting product into the electronics market – the Que. (Don’t ask me how to say it, nor why they have chose such awful colours for their […]
Continue readingJust what did Rutherford get up to?
This story, reported by Hamish Johnston, is interesting. Did Rutherford leave something nasty lurking in his lab in Manchester? What mutant lifeforms are slowly evolving at the back of his old filing cabinet? Is Coronation Street safe? What hideous organism is about to eat its way out of the building and destroy half of North West England? […]
Continue readingEthicis in physics
Physicists don’t usually have to put too many proposals before ethics committees in their working lives. (For the uninitiated, in simplistic terms an ethics committee is where a proposal for an experiment on/involving animals and/or humans will be discussed, to see if it is ‘appropriate’. Universities are full of them, and my biologist / psychologist […]
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