Surrey Physics Blog

To name is to define

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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Papers that changed the world, from Einstein to Li

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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What’s so funny about nuclear physics?

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 […]

Has Nadine Dorries got the wrong species?

Nadine Dorries has withdrawn her bill to promote abstinence in sex education. Perhaps she would have had better luck if she had gone after boobies. Male blue-footed boobies. Two blue-footed boobies are shown in the picture above.

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So wrong it breaks your calculator

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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