On Friday I was at a meeting in which most of the speakers were scientists working in the pharmaceutical industry. It was at the Royal Society of Chemistry’s London office which is just off Piccadilly in London. This was handy as there is an iron law of scientific meetings: The coffee is terrible. At lunch […]
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As a physicist of course I believe in quantitative measurements. For example physicists have measured the charge on the electron to an accuracy of more than 8 significant figures. This is great. But electrons are very simple objects. Scientists are more complex, and so a quantitative measurement of a scientist’s work is harder to do. […]
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I am teaching one of the things I most like to teach at the moment, and on Saturdays running Open Days. I am teaching signal-to-noise discrimination in the night vision of us and other animals, like the cat shown. Improving signal-to-noise is the reason why the eyes of cats and other animals that hunt at […]
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I have spent a lot of time recently reading drafts of my PhD student’s excellent, and over 200 page, thesis. It is written in Microsoft Word so I am switching on this softare’s track-changes function and using it to add comments to my students’ draft chapters, and to tweak the English here and there (her first […]
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