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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I am reading, and enjoying, “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine“, Michael Lewis’ book on the 2008 financial crash. Judging from the book, the main reasons for the crash were human factors, basically people were placing multi-billion dollar bets they didn’t understand. They assumed the bets were virtually risk free. This was a mistake. […]
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Hello! A slightly belated welcome from me to the Surrey Physics blog. I’m one of the regular contributors, along with Jim Al-Khalili, Richard Sear and Clare Harvey. I thought I’d kick off by introducing myself and some of what I do in the Physics Department at the University of Surrey. Now, as it happens, it’s […]
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I am writing a review on crystallisation, i.e., on how crystals like salt, ice, etc, form. So I am reading lots of scientific papers on crystallisation. A lot of them are very technical but I came across one on chocolate. From this I learnt that there are six forms of chocolate, of which the tastiest […]
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On and off, I guess I have been seriously fretting about the meaning of quantum mechanics, the powerful and hugely successful theory of the subatomic world, for over a quarter of a century. Now you might be thinking I am just a bit slow on the uptake – surely by now, as a practising theoretical […]
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