It’s not commonly known that the Monument in London was constructed not only to commemorate the great fire, but also as a scientific laboratory. Two of the great scientists of the day, Hooke and Newton performed experiments in basic physics and materials science. Yesterday evening, some physicists, myself included from Queen Mary University visited with …
Category Archives: physics
Touching Mars
The Natural History Museum in London is one of my favourite places in the world, so it was wonderful to spend two days there last week at a conference on X-raying stuff. On the last day there was a presentation by Dr Caroline Smith on Martian meteorites. She spoke on how X-ray imaging allowed the …
Astrophotography & Star Trails
While trying to photograph meteors in the Perseids shower recently I ended up taking a lot of longish exposure photographs of the same patch of sky. I was hoping to catch a meteor or several shooting though the frame. Reviewing the photos when I got home I found I caught no meteors, indeed I saw …
The insides of things are beautiful…
…lets see what they look like. These days I work with X-Ray systems. I’m just finishing up commissioning and testing of the latest one, so I’m using it to image various things. This is a compact fluorescent lamp. At full size you can see the coils of tungsten wire in the electrodes in the glass …