This is the blog post in which I hope to segue smoothly from tequila to the planet Uranus. Let’s start with tequila. A couple of years ago some Mexican scientists got some press attention by making diamonds from tequila.
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Good work if you can get it
The best thing about making a television documentary is that you get to visit and gain access to locations you would either not be allowed to see or simply did not know about. In the past few years I have had the privilege of holding Newton’s first edition Principia Mathematica (and even checked out some […]
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Learning from the students
Today was the day our MPhys students give their talks, saying what they did on their Research Years. All our MPhys students spend a year doing research near the end of their 4-year course. I learnt something from all 4 talks I attended, and I was very impressed. They had all done very good work […]
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Red, orange and yellow crystals
Many people know that graphite and diamond are both pure carbon – the only difference is that the carbon atoms are arranged differently in the two types of crystals. In graphite the carbon atoms are arranged in sheets, which can slide past each other easily allowing graphite to be used in pencils, while in diamond […]
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Teamwork gets a PhD
The stereotype of the academic scientist is often an Einstein-like figure. A solitary genius with frizzy white hair wrestling with the secrets of the universe. Reality is a bit different. Most of the actual research in universities is done by PhD students and postdocs (people who have just done PhDs), and also by final year […]
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Picometres
During a meeting with Jim Al-Khalili and our project student, Spencer (Jim mentions our project here) we talked about the appropriate length units with which to discuss different physical objects. When talking about things of human dimensions, metres are sensible units, but when talking about distances between stars, light years are more reasonable, as we […]
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