Ethicis in physics

Physicists don’t usually have to put too many proposals before ethics committees in their working lives. (For the uninitiated, in simplistic terms an ethics committee is where a proposal for an experiment on/involving animals and/or humans will be discussed, to see if it is ‘appropriate’. Universities are full of them, and my biologist / psychologist […]

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Centrifugal carrot

We bought a vegetable juicer recently.   At one end you feed in all those delicious carrots and corguettes that have been growing nicely in the vegetable patch, and at the other end comes out carrot and corguette juice.  Get the right combination of vegetables, and it’s a nice drink. (I don’t recommend kohlrabi though. Actually, we […]

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The wrong kind of question

Following on from yesterday’s discussion of the paper by Gire et al. I’ll remark on one little aspect of this study that physics teachers and lecturers need to take note of. (Well, in my opinion they do, and I’ve got a steadily increasing pile of literature to back me up on this). One of the questions […]

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How does a physicist think?

As part of my reading for the Postgraduate Certificate in Tertiary Teaching (henceforth known as the PGCert(TT) )  I’ve come across this article by Gire et al. on how physics students think.   The study looked at how closely the physics-thought-processes of undergraduate and graduate students aligned with the physics-thought-processes of practising physicists.    In other words, do students […]

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I hate maths…

I’ve spent most of the morning grappling with a bit of troublesome mathematics.  I can tell that I’ve had enough, because I’m starting to see greek letters tango with roman ones across the computer screen before raising themselves to inappropriate powers and differentiate themselves into oblivion, and graphs of noisy data that are beginning to […]

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Technology wins again…

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. […]

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Dynamic equilibrium

I keep a list in a notebook about possible things I could write a blog entry about. When I see something in the media, or something happens at work, anything to prompt me to think about a particular area of physics really, and I scribble it down and may choose to inflict it upon the world at a […]

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