physics
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Teaching Experiences: Fourier at Imperial
Today I started teaching my first real lecture course (as pointed out in the comments, the link is only accessible within the Imperal network). I am teaching the second-year physics students mathematical techniques of Fourier Series and Fourier Transforms — this is the theorem that you can represent any function as a sum of so-called…
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Majorana in superposition
This morning I found what is undoubtedly one of the weirdest papers ever to appear on the arXiv, “Ettore Majorana: quantum mechanics of destiny“, by O. B. Zaslavskii. On the one hand, it’s a short retelling of the life of Ettore Majorana, a major figure in the development of mid-20th-Century particle physics. On the other,…
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Marx: Science and Paradox
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It is … paradox that the earth moves round the sun, and that water consists of two highly inflammable gases. Scientific truth is always paradox, if judged by everyday experience, which catches only the delusive nature of things. –Karl Marx, Das Kapital, quoted by Francis Wheen in The Guardian. Or that objects in motion tend…
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I thought that was my job
“Physics Elevated to an Art Form” — Oakley‘s new tag line.
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Spending pounds and bending light (two ways)
I spent the early part of the week in Sheffield at the first meeting of the Institute of Physics Astroparticle Physics Group. There were talks on the search for the Dark Matter, gravitational waves, neutrino astrophysics, gamma-ray astrophsyics, and, of course, cosmology. All of this sometimes goes by the name “non-accelerator particle physics”: trying to…
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Teaching
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Regular readers may have noted a slackening of my posting pace over the last couple of weeks. For the first time in life, I’m earning my keep doing what most people think a “University Lecturer” (a.k.a. “College Professor” in the US) gets paid to do: teaching (in fact, most of our professional stature and advancement…
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