Mega- and nano-everything

 While generally speaking I’m very pleased to hear physics words appear in everyday conversation, I would prefer for them to be used approximately correctly. ‘Exponentially‘ is a case in point – it gets used for something that keeps getting bigger, regardless of how exponential it really is.  So, while ‘nanotechnology’ is a good word to […]

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Teaching how to think physics

One of the things I frequently bleat about is that physics isn’t synonymous with stuffing numbers into formulae. Therefore, it’s with some horror that I’ve watched through my attempts at doing the 2012 NZQA Scholarship Physics exam and seen myself stuffing numbers into formulae. At least, that is how many of the videos come across […]

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When inifinity isn’t infinite

I’ve been having some discussion with a collaborator in Sydney regarding a numerical model that we are developing. It concerns the response of the brain to pulses of magnetic field, but for the purposes of this blog entry, that is immaterial. One thing that we’ve been grappling with is ‘dealing with infinity’. Basically, in physical […]

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