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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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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