Probably most people know that stars and planets are very different. Very different. A star is a massive collection of plasma sustaining nuclear reactions, so far away (apart from our own Sun) that its light takes many years to get to us. A planet is much smaller and is a rocky/gaseous ball that orbits our […]
Month: March 2018
Who first split the atom? And, how to win quizzes…
Growing up I knew that the answer to the quiz question ‘Who first split the atom?’ was ‘Ernest Rutherford’, even if I didn’t necessarily know exactly what the question meant. It still occurs in quiz circles – check out question 20 in the Daily Telegraph’s science and nature quiz from 2010. The answer is Ernest […]
What does 4380 mean? Or, how much coffee is in a half-pound bag of coffee…?
The number 4380 got picked from a random pressing of the numeric keypad. It could be any number. We’re going to discuss the semi-random number, 4380, as a way to get, maybe, a fresh insight into what numbers do. Numbers for counting The first thing to say is that 4380, as written (and we’ll write […]
Science is hard if you anthropomorphize your molecules
The inspiration for this post comes from a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon (if you are from a generation unfamiliar with these Bill Watterson cartoons, then go and discover them after reading this blog). Calvin sees his mum crying in the kitchen, and asks why. She explains that she is cutting up an onion, to which […]
Trying to visualise a nanometre
Working in science, and more recently in science communication, I frequently find myself working in the nano-world – wavelengths measured in nanometres, nanostructures, forces that act over unimaginably short length scales. I never used to question these distances – they were all just numbers followed by ‘nm’. Recently, however, after thinking about various topics to write […]