I’ve just received my confirmation / reminder email for my place on the Extreme Natural Hazards conference later this month at the Royal Society in London. Two days of talks and discussions about the various ways the world is trying to kill us off. The conference is free to attend and I believe you can …
Category Archives: geeking
Eclipse
This coming Monday morning there is a solar eclipse, it isn’t a total eclipse of the sun, the last of those visible from the UK was in 1999, this is a partial eclipse. It starts 08:49, the point of maximum eclipse is a 10:01 and the moon leaves the solar disk at 11:18. If you …
What I do.
This post presents an overview of my work for the last 3 years. Essentially I’ve been developing new techniques for structuring materials on the sub milimeter scale by a combination of laser ablation, plasma chemistry and standard wet chemistry. Silicon has been the wonder material of the late 20th century and looks set to continue …
A matter of scale (ice spikes and silicon pillars)
One of the great things about science is how interlinked everything is once you start looking deeply enough. One example of this came a couple of months back when I was reviewing the electron micrographs from the latest experiment. My work involves the growing of meso-scale (about a 100th of a millimeter) pillars on a …
Continue reading “A matter of scale (ice spikes and silicon pillars)”
Death of a pioneer
On Friday 16th September, Gordon Gould the inventor of the laser died. Gould claimed that the idea and principles for the laser came to him one afternoon in 1957. His lab book details his ideas on a page under the title “Some rough calculations on the feasibility of a LASER: Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission …