Torsional pendulums and earthquakes

The shaking here in Hamilton is hardly on the scale of Seddon and Wellington, but it does mean my students aren’t going to get anything meaningful out of their measurement of the gravitational constant this afternoon. The Cavendish experiment uses a sensitive torsional pendulum, whose motion is currently more dominated by ground movement than by […]

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Version control

I’ve commented before that there are a lot of skills that our science graduates need to have, that don’t get explicitly taught at university. That’s because they don’t neatly fit into compartmentalized degree courses where the structure is dictated by technical knowledge. So things such as how to give a half-decent presentation, how to keep […]

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Hotspot and Silicone Tape

Well, today’s big story is just perfect for PhysicsStop. Cricket meets physics. What more could I ask for. In case you’ve just arrived from Alpha Centauri,  there have been accusations flying that both English and Australian batsmen have been trying to defeat the ‘Hot Spot‘ detector by putting silicone tape on their bats. The allegations […]

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Gravity goes downwards

Yesterday afternoon I was engaged in a spot of DIY – putting up some shelves. Even for me, as someone who takes to DIY like a duck to mountaineering, it’s a fairly simple task, and I’m pleased to say that I got there without the ‘do’ in DIY turning into ‘destroy’. With the help of […]

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All classes are different

I’m sure many people have had a conversation with a school-teacher friend that goes along these lines: You: "How are you today" Teacher: "Uh. I’m in a bad mood. I’ve just had class 8C. Why do they have to be so difficult?" You: "Is that just normal of year eights?" Teacher: "No. Last year’s lot […]

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