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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Numbers can be interesting, and there are some very striking ones in Whoops!, an excellent book by John Lancaster – on our current financial predicament. One is that (as of a couple of years ago) the RBS bank group (Royal Bank of Scotland, Natwest, etc., i.e., the one we now own) had £1.81 trillion of […]
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I like liquids, I have been studying them since my PhD. Mainly I have been trying to understand them, but many scientists and engineers study them because they are so useful. Over the last 10 to 20 years people have been developing what is called microfluidics, which is kind of playing around with lots of little droplets. But […]
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