The last couple of days have seen our Engineering Design Show. This is where our 2nd/3rd/4th year Engineering students get to talk about and show off the various projects they've been working on in the last year. It's very interesting to see the range of activities going on, and there are some 'competitive events' – […]
Continue readingTag: thermodynamics
Temperature is not Heat
First things first. PhysicsStop is back on-line after an enjoyable two-week break in warm and sunny southern England. Second things second. What advice can anyone give to the parents of a fourteen-month-old with jetlag who insists that 4 am is time to get up, have breakfast, and feed the chickens (or the "Choo Chuk" as […]
Continue readingThe amazing vacuum microwave
Happy Easter everyone. Sorry for lack of blog activity – lots of marking has been building up that I’ve needed to get through. Yesterday we experienced the vacuum-packing ability of a clip-container in a microwave. In this case, it was being used to cook some vegetables for Benjamin’s dinner. The veges were placed in the […]
Continue readingStructural failure: Jam yesterday
We’ve had a bumper crop of plums from our two plum trees. Way more than we can eat our way through in the short plum season. It appears that we aren’t the only ones – the last couple of weeks have seen bucket loads of free plums turn up in the tea-room here. (And yet […]
Continue readingEarly warnings of a change of state
It’s been wonderful watching Benjamin grow in the last nine and a bit weeks. He’s now become fully interactive – he’ll respond to what we do and what’s going on around him. hearing him ‘talk’ is fun – he can come out with an excited string of goos and gahs when he’s happy. Naturally, though, […]
Continue readingThermoeconomics
I’ve been following with a bit of interest the "slow-motion crisis" of the European debt. One of its consequences is some unhealthy shifts in exchange rates – for example the soaring Swiss Franc. That hurts Swiss exporters. In the last couple of days, Switzerland has decided that this isn’t acceptable and is taking drastic measures […]
Continue readingHot air rises
Well, we have now moved into our new house. We moved last Friday, mostly dodging the heavy showers that have been marauding around the country for the last week. We are slowly unpacking – the place is looking a lot tidier now than it did at the weekend, but it will take a while to […]
Continue readingChocolate problems
Thinking back to last week’s MasterChef (the chocolate tower of terror – re-live it here), there were a couple of nice examples of cooking being a branch of physics. I’ve heard it said that cookery is all about managing the flow of heat into (or, in this case, out of) an object, which, of course, […]
Continue readingUses of Liquid Nitrogen
I went to the doctor yesterday and he attacked me with liquid nitrogen. To be more specific, I had a wart ‘frozen’ off. Now, I had some similar treatment years ago, in which the doctor used a container of the stuff surrounded by polystyrene foam, and open to the air. Rather like what we use […]
Continue readingHot, heat, temperature and thermodynamics confusion
Consider the following perfectly reasonable sentences: "It’s hot outside" "The oven is heating up" "Insulation helps keep a house warm" Here we have physics words and concepts being used in everyday English in ways that are rather loose from a physics point of view. Does the conventional English use of words such as ‘heat’, ‘temperature’, ‘insulate’, […]
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