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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I have just got back from co-chairing a scientific workshop in Switzerland. It was great, hard work, but great. Togther with the other workshop chair, Paddy Royall, we had invited scientists to come from places as far away as Tokyo in Japan, and Houghton, which is a small city on Lake Superior on the border […]
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It’s coursework deadline time in the Department. So this week I read and suggested corrections on a draft of a student’s report that is due in on Monday. One of my corrections was that the student should cite the source of a graph he had reproduced in one of the report’s figures. He had cited […]
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