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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I will start teaching diffusion in a few weeks. Diffusion is how everything from gas and liquid molecules to small particles in a liquid move around – when there is no flow. As usual I will be telling some small lies. I will say something like “Diffusion of particle can be described as a random […]
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It has been a busy week, the undergraduates are back, semester has started, and all 3 of the academic bloggers in the Department got to dress like penguins (see piccy of Jim to the left). The occasion for the dressing-like-a-penguin was the Institute of Physics (IoP)’s annual awards bash. Jim won the Kelvin medal this […]
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When I was an undergraduate student, back in the dim and distant 1990s, I enjoyed my undergraduate degree, and hopefully I learned a lot of stuff, but I spent the whole degree learning by going to lectures, solving problems and going to lab classes, until I could avoid the latter in the final year by […]
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I love the Ig Nobel prizes. These are the annual awards that are announced a bit before the Nobel prizes, and recognise a wide spectrum of science, including both very bad science and science that is good, but on a topic that is on first appearance a bit whacky. This year‘s physiology prize went Wilkinson, […]
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The title of this post is a quote, of disputed origin. Its true. CERN is currently spending billions of euros and employing armies of supersmart people looking for the Higgs particle (as well as doing more fun and useful stuff too). The Higgs mechanism was stolen from condensed-matter physics by particle physicists, whose descendants are running […]
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