As a child, I was oddly fascinated by how ears work. I used to ask “How can we hear two things at once and tell them apart?” I still think this is a much better question than it is given credit for, one that people rarely stop to think about. And it is what this […]
Month: October 2018
A primer on the standard model (Part 2 of 2)
This is part 2 of a primer on the standard model. If you missed part 1, you can find it here. The eightfold way Let’s begin with the mesons (pions and kaons). They have charges of +1, 0 or -1, and strangenesses of +1, 0 or -1. We can draw a chart with strangeness on […]
Particle physics – a primer on the standard model (Part 1 of 2)
Making sense of the ‘particle zoo’ This is a great decade for the popularisation of science in general, and physics in particular. The detection of gravitational waves by LIGO, and the books of Carlo Rovelli, are just two things that have caught the public imagination. But nothing has done more in this regard than the […]
Atomic structure and the periodic table (full version)
In this article, we hope to develop an understanding of atomic structure and the periodic table, from the beginning of secondary school/junior-high level, to first/second year undergraduate physics/chemistry, via one fictional conversation. This was orginally put online in six parts – you can still access those parts separately if you prefer from our blog page. […]