The Fluid Dynamics Simplification

Apparently we breathe air between 8 and 14 times a minute. Despite this a physicist may tell you that air is negligible, insignificant, of no concern. The reason for this is physics sometimes needs to be simplified to work. One of the most common simplifications is to ignore air resistance altogether. At the point at which air becomes a concern it becomes its own subject: Aerodynamics, a smaller part...

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The Academy-Keeping Corolary

The mission has been making some steady progress recently. But now it's time to start setting the sails to pick up some speed, but to do so, there needs to be a bit of house-keeping. The main place that needs an update is the lists. Now is the time for that academy-keeping. Setting the sails of the muon Academy. List-en Update! The lists have rightfully been renamed to: List 1, 2 and 3, where...

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Into the Doc, the Horror

About a month ago, some typical rainy weather joined me as I set forth on the first day of my physics PhD. It started with the regulars: finding places, meeting people, making passwords, learning how to lift a box... then it really started. Like the blood on the bleeding walls of The Amityville Horror movie, the physics started oozing out. It oozes out thick and fast. The duty of the PhD student is...

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The Standard Model Standard

The moderately hungover first years were blissfully unaware of what I was about to tell them. For the past month I have been teaching undergraduate classical mechanics and this week I made an announcement. An announcement of the 2013 physics Nobel Prize winners. In an attempt of dramatics, I also told the tale of the Brout-Englert-Higgs boson, for it was Peter Higgs and François Englert...

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The Bucket Squirt Phys-elation

There are occasions when you can get hopped up on physics. You'll be taking it easy exploring a bit of physics when BAM! You find out about something revolutionary. Something like quantum tunnelling. It leaves you shocked and excited. Perhaps even sit-down excited. It's the physics feel good moment. A phys-elation. It's not the same as a eureka moment, but it is a good thing that happens more than...

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The Vagabond Decision Algorithms

In the last blog post, I was in the scenically crowded seaside town of Whitby. Since that time I have packed my bindle and journeyed on southward. When it came to unpacking, I had to pause for awe. There was so much packed, it was ridiculous! But it reminded me of something. It reminded me of the bin packing algorithm. This bit of maths comes under the umbrella known as "Decision Mathematics"....

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The Seaside Physics Juxtaposition

I grew up in an English seaside town. Dirty yellow boots, stinking scampi and tourists, lots and lots of tourists. I lived there until I was eighteen. Right now, I've found myself back in that seaside town where my physics cranium started. It's odd to look back and wonder why I got into physics. I'd like to say something elegantly epic like:  "[I] wanted to be part of the romantic, exciting...

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The Thidé Book of EMT

An entire book on electromagnetic theory, free to download! That was my reaction when I found exactly that. It comes from a physicist who works at Uppsala University. A physicist named Bo Thidé, and the book, of course, is called "Electromagnetic Field Theory". Electromagnetic Field Theory by Bo Thidé I found this book out of necessity - I needed to look-up some EMT. It's the course book for...

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The Astronomy Virtualisation

It's difficult to not feel like dreamers when looking up at the night sky. Unless you're kicking it in the big smoke ... or anywhere that has a street light. That's because of light pollution. But you can freely defeat light pollution with a laptop, smartphone or tablet. I'm not talking about hacking the government, I'm talking of virtual astronomy. Below are three of the best methods of astronomy...

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The Pasture of C++ Notes

A while ago I needed to learn a programming language. But which one? There's a lot to choose from. Baffled and confused, I took a piece of advice from a computer scientist friend: "C++, because once you learn that, all other languages will follow". Nice and simple, now to learn it. A lot of graduate students will start their studies without knowing a great deal of programming languages. This...

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The YouTube VT Round

Sometimes I cringe when I think about all the time that I’ve wasted on YouTube watching the sneezing panda video. But, YouTube has a lot of physics videos too. The only problem is, it also has a lot of crap physics videos. With a little bit of exploring, you can uncover the really good ones. Here’s some of the best ones that you can watch in less than 5 minutes. MinutePhysics By searching physics,...

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The Perimeter Institute Video Inclusion

The Perimeter Institute is the Black Pearl on the theoretical physics ocean. Among its’ crew are some of the leading researchers in particle physics, string theory, cosmology, condensed matter and quantum physics. So, when the Perimeter Institute do lectures or seminars, you expect them to be pretty good ones. Amazingly, you can make this decision for yourself as you can access every single recorded...

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The Academy Renamed

It's finally happened! mmxi Academy has been renamed to: muon Academy a name that breathes a refreshing hint of physics without being stupidly obvious. The muon bit Of course, a muon is a fundamental particle. At the time of it's discovery around the 1930s-40s, the Nobel laurette, Isidor Rabi, made a catty comment about the muon: "Who ordered that?". Me-ow. Well, the reason that he said this...

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The Cambridge Cosmology Consequence

Cosmology is a beautiful thing; so is Stephen Hawking. He’s done a lot for cosmology, so much that he has a research centre at Cambridge named after him: The Stephen Hawking Centre for Theoretical Cosmology. The good thing about Cambridge is that they have an enormous amount of money. Their total financial endowment is in excess of £4.3 billion! With this money they make pretty websites...

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The Arxiv Repository

The function of a researcher is to write articles for big and expensive journals, such as Physical Review Letters. After this, the institute that paid for the research looks good and their respect goes up (like a gang in GTA). At least, that’s the hope anyway. In reality, the process is best summed up by the Mumford and Sons line:  “Crawl on my belly ‘til the sun goes down.” but perhaps...

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The Fitzpatrick Physics Files

There's a character in The Big Bang Theory who looks like a praying mantis. This character is of course Sheldon Cooper - a child prodigy from Texas. Texas has given us more scientists than just Sheldon, take Sandy from Spongebob for example. There is too much evidence for this to be a coincidence. It's something to do with Texas. I think the  University of Texas man, Richard Fitzpatrick, shares...

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The Grim and Gravity Connection

Gravity makes getting up in the morning difficult, it’s also responsible that unpleasant kiss of the curb when you've had too much to drink. Well, gravity and alcohol is. With gravity affecting so much of our life, you would think that it was easy to figure out, but it really wasn't, and still isn't. It’s story started over 2000 years ago, and involved a surprising amount of misery and death. A...

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