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Not So Elementary (the Cosmos, That Is)

Recently there are appeared a paper showing how Physics - Iron–Helium Compounds Form Under...

Carbon — to capture or not to capture

This came up on 2nd November 2024 (give or take a day), a broadcaster objecting to a carbon capture...

The Azolla Event: when is a fern not a fern?

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Betelgeuse, Gamow, and a Big Red Horse

There has been a lot of talk recently of Betelgeuse possibly going supernova this century or not...

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Robert H OlleyRSS Feed of this column.

Until recently, I worked in the Polymer Physics Group of the Physics Department at the University of Reading.

I would describe myself as a Polymer Morphologist. I am not an astronaut,

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Welsh miners’ sons in physics

Welsh miners’ sons in physics

Sep 10 2008 | comment(s)

Welsh miners’ sons in physics Reading an article Death threat to scientists over Big Bang test, I learn that one of the leading figures behind the experiment is Lyn Evans, the son of a miner, whose fascination with science started as a boy, when he would create small explosions with his chemistry set at his council house in Aberdare, South Wales. Some years ago I attended a talk given by Sir John Meurig Thomas, FRS, himself a miner’s son from South Wales.
Not only Galileo

Not only Galileo

Sep 08 2008 | comment(s)

The mediaeval western European church had hitched its wagon very tightly to the philosophy of Aristotle, and by extension to the astronomical model of Ptolemy. This caused Galileo no small amount of aggro. One of the greatest mathematicians and physicists of Mediaeval Islam, namely Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham, (965-1040) encountered a similar problem.
Chemistry chief stamps on exam eggshells

Chemistry chief stamps on exam eggshells

Aug 30 2008 | comment(s)

Here is a somewhat provocative article by the Chief Exec of the Royal Society of Chemistry. Have a read, and please tell me what you think. (For non-UK readers, GCSEs are taken at the end of year 11, after which one is allowed to leave school.
Women in Science (Physics) – a view from Education

Women in Science (Physics) – a view from Education

Aug 27 2008 | comment(s)

I sent the Professor Meg Urry interview to a colleague who is quite high-up in graduate teacher training. Here is his reply .
We do have a lot of evidence about student motivation and about their view about the Nature of Science (Physics). What is disappointing about Meg's comments is that they are solely anecdotal and only related to her view, yet if she read a little more widely, she would discover a broader perspective. The ROSE project, based in Oslo, is the probably the latest and largest project on student motivation towards sciences in secondary schools, covering many countries in the modern and traditional world.
LHC Rap

LHC Rap

Aug 27 2008 | comment(s)

An explanation in RAP format of what the Large Hadron Collider is all about. It's nested in the following Daily Telegraph article. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/08/26/scirap... I enjoy it, hope y'all do too!
Was Hippasus Pushed? (and Other Mysteries Of Mathematics)

Was Hippasus Pushed? (and Other Mysteries Of Mathematics)

Aug 26 2008 | comment(s)

Was Hippasus pushed? If you are even mildly interested in the history of mathematics, it is likely that you will have heard something like the following story. The Pythagoreans (who were also into music in a big way) worshipped numbers, and believed them to be the basis of everything. If one were to do a modern caricature of this, it might go: 
  Do you believe in Rock ’n’ Roll?
  Can mathematics save your soul?
By numbers, they meant whole numbers or positive integers. Whether this included ‘one’ is a moot point, because later Greek mathematicians regarded ‘one’ as the ‘generator of numbers’. One day, a man called Hippasus discovered that the square root of 2 was irrational. This went so much against the Pythagorean world view that they took him out to sea and threw him overboard. It didn’t stop there, though.