It is sometimes hard as a scientist to maintain a broad focus. It is very easy to get obsessed with your pet project and forget the equally important stuff being done by scientists and others elsewhere. Just because you find your research extremely interesting and you can see lots of uses for it, it doesn’t […]
Continue readingTag: teaching
Waves in a plasma
This post follows from a comment I had yesterday from Robert McCormick on the www.sciblogs.co.nz version of PhysicsStop. (Unfortunately the mapping of PhysicsStop onto the sciblogs website doesn’t combine the comments – so if you read my blog through The University of Waikato website you won’t have got his comment, so I attach the link below) […]
Continue readingGroup dynamics
Well, I went down to Wellington last Thursday and presented at the Science Express event at Te Papa. It was the third time I’ve done a talk in that manner on the Large Hadron Collider, and it was for me intriguing how the audiences have picked up on different things each time. The first time […]
Continue readingWhat’s the catch?
Last weekend Alison Campbell and I took a trip to New Plymouth to do a day session with final year school students to help them prepare for their physics and biology scholarship exams. (Alison did the Biology half, I did the physics). I do hope the students got something useful out of it. Doing this kind […]
Continue readingThe3is in three final
I attended the final of the The3is in Three competition on Wednesday night. It was a really entertaining evening; compere Te Radar was in great form, as were the eight finalists (N.B. I know that those of you who are not from NZ won’t have the slightest idea who Te Radar is, but I’m sure […]
Continue readingUsing words is OK
I’m in the thick of marking exam papers. In physics, a lot of what a student does is mathematically based, so a fair bit of any exam is going to contain calculations of things. But don’t think that it is compulsory to make your answer totally incomprehensible. Many of the exam answers I see from […]
Continue readingTeaching research
Over the last week or so I have, amongst other things, been doing some preparation for two summer scholarship students that will be working with me from December to February. The summer scholarships are a great opportunity for undergraduate students to experience what research is like. The University of Waikato, like several other universities, offers […]
Continue readingAll your favourite science blogs
The amazing people at the Science Media Centre in Wellington have put together www.sciblogs.co.nz , all your favourite NZ science blogs in one easy to access site. Physicsstop is there, along with a host of others. The only downside is that with such a great collection of items to read, when am I going to find […]
Continue readingThere is more than one physicist in New Zealand
My wife and I stayed at a lovely Bed and Breakfast on the Coromandel Peninsula over the weekend. Here’s a snippet of conversation with the hosts over breakfast. Host: What do you do for a living? Me: I lecture physics at Waikato University Host: Really? I used to lecture physics in the US – I’m a […]
Continue readingAs if by magic…
This week I’ve been talking to my third year mechanical engineering class about the Lagrangian approach to solving dynamical problems. OK, please don’t close your browser now, rest assured that you don’t need to know what the Lagrangian approach is to follow this post. (if you do, then click here.) I reckon there are two ways […]
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