This post is just a little late for Halloween. Sorry. But last week I lectured on how we see in the dark – it is a nice problem in statistics to show that, remarkably I think, we can detect light even if less than 10 photons are absorbed by our retina. This is possible because […]
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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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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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