The not so Big Bang
Astrophysics with SL again. Started by discussing Newtons static model of the Universe and they quickly got the idea that if the universe is static then it must be infinitely big and time must be infinite,...
Snow branch
Another day another branch. The weather has been superb so today called for a longer walk with once again snow covered branches on my mind. The photo shows another interesting aspect of snowy branches,...
Snowed under
The day after we decided to make snow the theme for our Gp 4 project it snowed, the project isn't for another 2 weeks so we shouldn't get too excited though. When we were discussing the project one of...
How did they do that?
Today I was teaching about binary stars to my second year SL class. It's often interesting to think about how some of these discoveries were made without the help of modern technology, In the case of...
Not over yet
Sometimes I just can't get things out of my head like this problem with the minimas in sound intensity around the room, they are definitely there, I heard them. They are about 20 or 30cm apart so if you...
Don't think
The other day I got my students moving there heads around whilst I played the same note through the speakers of my laptop. If you try it you can hear a marked difference as you move from a quite loud...
Head bangers
Its amazing what you can get students to do, today I got them to put one finger in an ear and shake their heads from side to side. The point of it was to listen for minimums and maximums in sound intensity...
Bath time
I've just been marking some of the reports my students have written about the "resonance in a bucket" experiment. The idea is that they measure the velocity of shallow water waves travelling back and...
raining in silicon valley
Now it's raining again so I'm glad that got a new jacket for Christmas. My old jacket was 15 years old and although still sort of functional was looking a bit warn out. The new one is a top of the range...
The VSBT
Today I was teaching some Astrophysics to my SL class. I made a binary star with interactive physics and they thought it was out of this world (haha). I am always amazed by how much we know from such...