The highlight of my day was solving a simple partial differential equation problem, that I had set myself. It was a good day. I am not sure that I should admit this in public, but there you go, I have now. A lot of science and math is problem solving and scientists and mathematicians often […]
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I am currently reading a book on the elements called The Periodic Tale by Hugh Aldersley-Williams. It’s pretty good. One thing that I have learnt is that gold has an E number – as in the number that all food additives permitted by the EU are assigned. It is E175. It strikes me that if […]
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Today was the last UCAS day of this admissions round. UCAS days are where we invite along prospective students who have applied to do physics at Surrey. They come along, often with a parent or two, and we show them the Department, they talk to our students, and to academics like me.
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Our colleague Paddy Regan has been on all the networks from the BBC to Aljazeera, talking about the Fukushima reactors and the dangers from the radiation. Radioactivity is not my field, Paul knows more than I, see the previous post, but I saw this very nice chart. It illustrates in one image, doses from that from […]
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The recent earthquake and tsunami is a terrible tragedy for Japan and the Japanese people. At current count there are 17,000 dead or missing, according to the BBC news web site, and my heart goes out to the Japanese people in this difficult time. Despite the terrible destruction and loss of life caused, the news […]
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I am teaching things called partial differential equations at the moment. One of the most important of these is the diffusion equation. As the name suggests, it describes diffusion. Diffusion is everywhere. For example, in your body, diffusion is how the oxygen gets from your blood into the cells where it is needed.
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