When you think bubbles, you probably don’t think of nineteenth century aristocrats. But bubbles were one of the many things the 3rd Baron Rayleigh studied towards the end of the nineteenth century. He is in the picture at the top left.
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Cats’ eyes and radioactive bananas
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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You can’t eliminate the evidence for climate change with Microsoft Words’ track-changes feature
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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Keeping it simple
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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Bloggers night out
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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MPhys in Tennessee
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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