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 reading

What 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 reading

Mind 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 reading

The 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 reading

Mobile 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 reading

ET 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 reading

My 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 reading

The 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 […]

Continue reading