Term has now ended, undergraduate teaching has finished for 2012, and most of the undergraduates have gone home. As always at the end of term, there is a certain amount of relief, it has been 11 weeks of hard work. But also a bit of sadness. Campus is a quieter, duller place without most of […]
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I have almost finished the biography of a scientific hero of mine, Pierre-Gilles de Gennes. One observation in the book has particularly struck me, and that is that de Gennes viewed his approach as more like that of the Impressionist artists, and less like the approach of the artist Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres.
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This is the last week of semester before the Christmas break, so things are getting a little busy, and I could spend a day at Cambridge talking science with an old friend and his PhD student. The student has started from a paper I did almost ten years ago, and is extending the work. He […]
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I am reading a biography of Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, by Laurence Plévert. De Gennes won the Nobel prize in physics in 1991. I guess he is a scientific hero of mine. The Nobel prize was for his work on understanding polymers and liquid crystals. You are probably reading this screen with a liquid crystal display of […]
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This is a rough estimate of the number of alien civilisations in our galaxy, obtained from the Drake equation. Last week I went to a Institute of Physics local branch general talk, by Alok Jha. He quoted this equation. The Drake equation is clearly a bit of a guess, but it is an interesting way […]
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