51st word for snow
I noticed this interesting phenomena on the way home from school. This snow has been around for ages now. Every day the sun comes out and each night it gets really cold, the result is snow with a very...
four words
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words well this one is worth 4. "colour blind physics teacher". It's not that I can't see the difference it's just that colours aren't so obvious to us colour...
No resistance
One of my 1st year classes has just been doing the "EMF and r" lab. Before I could run this lab I had to repair all of my multimeters that due to abuse by former students all had blown fuses. If the fuses...
Pananorama
This photo of London taken from the BT tower doesn't look very impressive but it's a screenshot from what is supposed to be the highest resolution panorama of a city ever taken. You can try zooming in...
Toast
I have been teaching physics for so long that I have developed "physics teacher syndrome". I can't help spotting physics in every day situations, these seem interesting to me but when I talk about to...
Meteorology
Big news this weekend has been the Russian meteor which caused a fair bit of panic and destruction in the Urals. Quite frightening that a 17meter diameter chunk of rock could suddenly pass into our atmosphere....
Hubble bubble
I've been doing astrophysics with both my SL and HL class so thought it would be nice to take them all on a trip to London to visit the science museum and see the Hubble film in the Imax theatre. As I...
Star bright
Today I did a neat demo to show how it's possible to get information about stars from a photo. I first googled "star" and next to Brad Pit was this rather colourful (fake) photo of some stars, perfect....
Cancel the anechoic chamber
From the photo it looks like my class are all chatting to friends on their mobile phones, I wonder why people always wander about like this while speaking on the phone. Anyway they aren't doing that,...
Gong
Last week I introduced my first year classes to the concept of designing experiments. The physical system under investigation was a wooden rod and two bit of string, many possible research questions that...