The most regular writer of this blog, Dr Richard Sear, is clearly too modest to announce here that he has started his own independent blog, entitled Chance and Necessity. I, on the other hand, have no such qualms in recommending that readers of our Departmental Blog add Richard’s separate blog to their reading list. I have certainly […]
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Wednesday and Thursday of this week I was at a biological physics meeting at St Catherine’s college, Oxford. The highlight for me was a talk by the very distinguished biologist Dennis Bray. It was a lovely talk. He started by mentioning the Blue Brain project – a project to reverse engineer the human brain. By reverse […]
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I’m from Barcelona (and I really mean it, unlike the Swedish band). Most of you might know the city for its prodigious football team, its gorgeous architectural masterpieces or its unique gastronomical scene. But Barcelona is also a key player in the international scientific scene. Among others, the city is a hub for biosciences, hosts […]
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Science is an international activity. Starting in about a month I will be teaching partial differential equations to our second years, and many of the equations I will be teaching are named after their discoverers, mostly French guys from the early nineteenth century. Needless to say the equations that govern electromagnetism in France in the […]
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In addition to eating too much, watching too much rubbish tv, and maybe drinking a little too much too, I have been reading a paper on the statistics of times-between-failures of air conditioning units of Boeing 720 airliners. These airliners are now obsolete, as I guess are the air conditioning units – the paper is from 1963. But the paper is a classic, the maths in it is relatively formal but the idea is simple.
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This is a departure from my usual posts. It is real science, done by me. For a change I thought I would show you a little bit of scientific research being done, and a little nugget of understanding about a physical process being gained. Some aspects of this are a bit technical, so I have […]
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