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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As I think I have said before on his blog, most science research is not done by middle-aged academics like me but by PhD students and postdocs (postdocs are typically people who have got their PhD within the last few years). We academics have so many things to do: teach, admin, meetings, more admin, etc, […]
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Today I ran the Physics bit of another University Open Day for prospective students. I think it went well. It ran smoothly as the earlier ones in July did (see my earlier post). They are quite rewarding to run as I think it is good to answer the questions of prospective students. I told one […]
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The image to the left is the first picture of Earth taken from the Moon. It was taken 45 years ago and now we are all used to seeing pictures of our home planet from space. Google maps gives you a satellite image of wherever you like, e.g., the University campus, in seconds. Some of these images […]
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