First the new stuff: Judging by the excited twittering of the last day or so, there are a few rather excited people at CERN. http://www.twitter.com/cern . It’s now running and producing collisions at 3.5 TeV per beam. We are well in the realm of new physics. The Higgs boson might feel a little nervous now – it […]
Continue readingMonth: March 2010
Things that don’t like water
So, my class of students (well, at least one of them) have done the calculations and think that a centimetre of water is enough to shield a mobile phone from communicating with the nearest mast. Only one way to find out. I’ll bring along a bucket, lots of glad wrap and waterproofing materials to tomorrow’s […]
Continue readingWhat goes up… must come down
Yesterday morning while driving into work I was reminded that this week is ‘Balloons over Waikato‘ – the annual hot air balloon festival. It was hard to miss; I counted 20 balloons making their way gracefully over south-east Hamilton and drifting slowly towards Morrinsville. (NB: I counted the balloons AFTER I had parked the car, […]
Continue readingMind games for physicists
Here’s a gem of a paper from Jonathan Tuminaro and Edward Redish. The authors have carried out a detailed analysis of the discussions a group of physics students had when solving a particular problem. They’ve worked hard (the researchers, as well as the students) – the first case study they chose was a conversation 45 […]
Continue readingThe invisibility cloak
Yes, the headline writers are at it again, talking about those crazy scientists designing invisibility cloaks. As usual, the articles I’ve seen in the papers (e.g. the front page of The Waikato Times) and popular internet sites are high in ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘Star Trek’ and low in science. Research into this kind of thing […]
Continue readingMobile phone physics
Just occasionally, I have a crazy thought regarding a physics demonstration. This is one that I’m thinking about inflicting on my third year electromagnetism class. We’ve been discussing the way electromagnetic waves travel (or rather, do not travel) through electrical conductors. Basically, conductors allow electric currents to flow in response to an applied electric field (in simple terms […]
Continue readingET home phone
This month’s feature article in PhysicsWorld is a plea by well-known science (particularly physics) writer Paul Davies to relaunch (or rather, expand) the search for extra-terrestrial life. The Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has been around for nearly fifty years, focusing on analyzing data from radio telescopes. But Paul Davies thinks there are other places […]
Continue readingMy kind of blog
This is what I like to see – a fellow blogger (Brian Clegg) extolling the virtues of physics blogging and tweeting. What’s interesting about Brian’s entry is that he talks about how a blog can trigger a discussion that increases the quality of the original posting. Like peer review for a scientific paper, but informal, […]
Continue readingCopper Conducting Considerable Current
The latest kitchen acquisition (no, we don’t spend all our money on buying things for the kitchen) is decent frying pan. We’ve spent too long with frying pans that are about as flat as the Southern Alps. It’s a copper-based pan, which probably accounts for its expense, with a stainless steel surface. The reason for the […]
Continue readingThe LHC ticks onwards
Last month, CERN took the decision to run The Large Hadron Collider for the next eighteen months or so, up to a maximum energy of 3.5 TeV per beam, before having an extended shutdown period to prepare to take it up to its design maximum of 7 TeV per beam. I am sure this will […]
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