These were the words of a father of a prospective student to me, as my feet hit the ground with a bit of a thump next to him. It was said jokingly but I had just come down a raked lecture theatre by jumping from desk to desk in an extremely poor approximation of a […]
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This week has been a good week, but a bit crazy busy. Our final year students got their degree results this week. We have a really good bunch of final year students, or as they will be in three weeks after picking up their certificates, a really good bunch of graduates. So that was really […]
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Famously, in Star Trek, space is the final frontier. But where is the frontier of space, or in other words: Where does space end, and the Earth’s atmosphere begin? I was prompted to think about that when I read an amusing sarcastic piece about Justin Bieber apparently going into space, aboard what Richard Branson’s Virgin […]
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Pretty much all models in physics are wrong of course. From Hooke’s model of the force of a spring, to Schrödinger’s equation in quantum mechanics, to Newton’s law for the force of gravity — all are wrong. Or more precisely, are approximations that work for many circumstances but fail in others. I am following in […]
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Above is a figure (it is figure 2.4 of the summary) of the International Panel on Climate Change report of 2007, i.e., the consensus report by scientists on how we are affecting the Earth’s climate. The figure is a bit crowded so ignore the details. Just start with the top bar — this shows the […]
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It is Friday, the sun is shining, and there is a temporary lull in my marking, so I am reading about scientists making artificial urine. [You can insert, that is taking the p*ss joke, here if you want to.] Naively, you may think that scientists are wasting their time by making artificial urine. If they […]
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