Ant attack

I won’t bore you with the details of the conference I’ve been at in Dresden, but I will mention this. As an example of a complex network, one of the speakers showed a little animation of movement of commercial aircraft across Europe. The animation consisted of a map of europe, with little dots showing the […]

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What’s the time?

What would you pay to know the time? Probably nothing. But go back a couple of hundred years, and people made a living out of selling the time. They would own a particularly high quality watch, and every morning they would go up to Greenwich and set it to exactly Greenwich Mean Time (simply the […]

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Greenwich

If ever you find yourself in London, I would very much recommend a visit to Greenwich. It’s a great day out – and includes attractions such as the Maritime museum, the old Naval College, and what remains of the tea clipper Cutty Sark after a recent devastating fire. But for a physicist like me, Greenwich really […]

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Catching a cricket ball

Here is a question I’ve been mulling over for a few days since I heard a cricket commentator raise it during the recent West Indies – South Africa Twenty20 match.  How high do you need to hit a cricket ball in order for it to reach terminal velocity on its way down? – in other words, […]

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Fuel consumption

So you’re used to reading about fuel consumption for cars, but what about planes?  The pilot of the rather aging Boeing 747 on which I travelled from Hong Kong to Frankfurt proudly stated that he had 140 thousand litres of fuel on board. (I think that’s what he said). The distance is about 9200 km […]

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Thermal expansion

Here’s a nice experiment to carry out on a freezing cold morning. Before driving to work / school / shopping centre / Auntie Betty’s, look under the bonnet of your car and make a note of the level of coolant in the expansion tank. Chances are its fairly low. After you get to work or wherever, […]

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Compton scattering

While we are talking about relativity, what about evidence for special relativity? That’s the area of physics which talks about the way things move at very high speeds (close to the speed of light).   For example, we talk about things contracting as they get faster (Lorentz contraction) and time slowing down (time dilation). Neither of […]

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