It was nice to hear this morning that someone actually has won the America’s cup, and there is now the prospect of getting back to some proper racing again instead of slugging it out in a courtroom. In the end it was superior technology, rather than a superior legal team, that won the day for […]
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Does my teaching work?
This year, I’ve finally decided (more accurately, finally got around to doing it) to undertake a Postgraduate Certificate in Tertiary Teaching. In plain English, that means do some training that actually prepares me to teach at university. "What?" I hear you say – "You mean you haven’t got any qualification to teach at university?". Nope. […]
Continue readingWhere the money is
I was reading this weekend in January’s physicsworld some curiously contrasting articles on the state of physics funding in various countries. The UK has recently announced some serious cutbacks to their international collaborative projects, in an attempt to claw back 40 million pounds that was mis-spent a couple of years ago following an accounting error. Whoops. […]
Continue readingThe rise and rise of the science journal
Every time I blink I seem to get another email from a science journal that I haven’t heard of inviting me to contribute to their most prestiguous publication. It’s all very flattering to get emails telling me that as a world leader in organic chemistry research I am invited to contribute to their well-read journal, […]
Continue readingClimate change
I feel that, as a physicist, I should be making some reasonable and informed comment on the Copenhagen summit. After all, climate is immensely physicsy. We have fluid flow, conduction, convection and radiation of heat, interaction of electromagnetic radiation with electrons in molecules, scattering of light by small particles, solar activity (on second thoughts, scrub […]
Continue readingRocket Science and Spam
Well, congratulations to Rocket Lab with the launch of their Atea-1 rocket. (Watch the movie). Hopefully this will go some small way to convincing the key players in the New Zealand economy that we can and should do more (a lot more) than just agriculture and tourism. And spamming. What an unfortunate distinction for a country to hold. […]
Continue readingOrbits
Going back to my comments on the Karman line (100 km about the earth’s surface), I think it’s worth commenting a bit ‘being in orbit’ means. We are familiar with the fact that if we drop something it accelerates downwards and hits the ground. If we throw something away from us, it will still accelerate […]
Continue readingHow to get publicity
For those of you wondering (and several have asked) how I managed to get a third of a page in the main section of last Sunday’s Sunday Star Times, the answer is simple. Tell the press about whatever story you want them to know about. Some journalists can be pretty good at digging up stories, […]
Continue readingBlink and you miss it
First collisions in the Large Hadron Collider http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2009/PR17.09E.html Only at a ‘paltry’ 0.45 TeV per beam (CERN are wanting to ramp that up to about 3.5 TeV per beam over the next few months) but one can really now say that the LHC ‘works’.
Continue readingThe final frontier
New Zealand is, hopefully, just a few days away from becoming a space-nation. The private company Rocket Lab (what a great name – I like names that describe what a business actually does) aims to put up its Atea-1 rocket from Great Mercury Island sometime around November 30th. The payload will reach an altitude of […]
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