This week, we ran our biggest and busiest ever UCAS day; well certainly the biggest in my memory, and I have been at the Surrey Physics Department for a very long time. Put it this way, in my earliest departmental photos I had hair, and lots of it. Even my mother can’t remember me with […]
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I kind of thought that “To name is to define” is a quote from someone, but if so then Wikiquote has let me down, as I can’t find it. I am writing a grant proposal and so need to make my proposed research look ground breaking, novel, important, etc, etc. Getting funding is competitive, the […]
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In science, and in other academic disciplines like economics, research is published in the form of papers. A paper is typically around 10 pages long and announces a new discovery, a new idea, etc. Famously, in his annus mirabilis of 1905, Einstein wrote 3 papers that changed the world, in a (mostly) good way.
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Every now and then I get asked if I’ll get involved in some kind of physics outreach activity; Giving a talk to a science society, going to a school to talk about physics at university, talking on the radio about the link between The Archers and quantum mechanics. That kind of thing. More often than […]
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I will start to teach an introductory statistical physics in a few weeks. One of the things I will do is talk about why in a still room the air is uniformly distributed in the room. The reason is statistics, to take an extreme example there is no law stopping all the gas molecules in […]
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