In the lab, my summer student has been working on a small device to keep a small piece of equipment at a stable temperature. It uses a Peltier device – in essence it's a solid-state heat pump. Pass through current one way, and heat is drawn from the top surface to the bottom; pass current […]
Continue readingTag: water
Lack of pressure
At the end of last week there was a problem with the water supply to part of the science buildings here at The University of Waikato. Today, there's been work going on to fix the problems. As a result, we have a very much reduced water pressure. The tea-room on the first floor is still […]
Continue readingThe causes of tidal waves (yeah, right)
Pseudoscience – the packaging of absolute gibberish in clever sounding scientific terms – is nothing new. Here’s an example my father-in-law has sent me, from the West Coast Times of 27 October 1869: Tidal Waves and their Causes. It’s a newspaper report of a lecture given in Melbourne on the causes of tsunami. I get […]
Continue readingThe ticker-tape car
Somewhere in the Cambridge / Hamilton vicinity is a car with no oil in it. I know this because on the way in to work this morning there was a trail of oil on the road. The damp road surface led to it being very prominent. A splash of oil, being less dense than water, […]
Continue readingThe bubble raft and lattice defects
After doing the washing up a few days ago, I returned to the sink to find a raft of bubbles had formed on the surface of the water. All the bubbles were roughly equal size, and they had aligned themselves into a close-packed lattice, as the photo shows. (Sorry about the quality of the photo […]
Continue readingA bigger splash
The crawling baby is now undertaking a series of physics experiments. His favourite is the investigation of vibrational modes on biscuit tins and their coupling to longitudinal waves in the atmosphere. But he’s also repeating Galileo’s (supposed) famous experiment in studying the free-fall acceleration of various objects. In this case the elevated position is not […]
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 readingBlackwater rafting
I’ve had my brother visiting from the UK, which has been a good excuse for doing some of the touristy things in the area. I wasn’t taken by the prospect of zorbing, but we did give blackwater rafting a go in the Ruakuri cave at Waitomo. I’ve always wanted a go at that – and […]
Continue readingDispersion in water waves
I’ve been perusing YouTube looking for good videos illustrating wave packets – which are bunches of waves containing different wavelengths. I want to come up with a good illustration for a second year physics paper on introductory quantum theory. This contains a lot of ‘wave’ things. Here’s a nice one I’ve stumbled on. It shows […]
Continue readingShock fronts: literature and surfing
One of baby Benjamin’s books has a storyline that goes like this. (Not wishing to fall foul of the Copyright Act I shall not quote directly from it – any sensible quote is about 10% or greater of the work!) There’s an animal that’s being chased by another animal. This second animal is being chased […]
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