4.54 billion years old (4.54 × 109 years old) Well, I am glad that is settled. I heard a fellow on YouTube deriding science by saying… “First they told us that the Earth was less than 10,000 years old, then it was hundreds of thousands of years old, then millions, now it is billions of years …
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Category:Scientific Method
More Randomness…
Randomness fascinates me, which is why I have encouraged readers of this blog to listen to the Stochasticity episode of the RadioLab podcast. (You can read about this and other podcast recommendations here.) The following is quite a lengthy (10 minute) video about the randomness (or entropy) of the Universe; free-will and quantum mechanics. It …
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Two Cultures…
I apologise in advance for the whimsical nature of this post. If you don’t want ‘philosophy’, you might prefer to read this, this or this; all of which are rich in sciency goodness and have interesting questions and comments for you to ponder. I was listening to Flanders and Swann (audio link at the end) …
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What Have The Romans Ever Done For Us…
Work done by Dr Nikola Koepke (formerly from Oxford University but now at Zurich Universtory) looked at the remains of skeletons from the 8th century BC until the 18th century AD and used changes in people’s heights over this period as a measure of how well fed they were. The study combined biology and archaeology …
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Units and Sig. Figs…
With my holidays almost at a close (but you still have masses of time so enjoy it!) I thought it would be worthwhile posting this from Hank Green. It is the second video of a series on Chemistry from the YouTube channel – Crash Course. It is a new channel to me but looks really …
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Tryptophan…
I go on about amino acids a lot. Sorry about that! If you click here you will be logged into Focus eLearning (come straight back!), then if you click here you will be taken to a nice page about how the digestive enzyme pepsin breaks a protein molecule in your food down into individual amino …
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Degrees Of Confidence…
As should be very obvious from how governments around the world have dealt with recent pandemic difficulties, science does not deal in absolute certainty. We often hear that they are ‘following the science‘ but I suspect that allows enough wiggle room for them to do what is politically most appealing. Science deals with probability and …
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Standard Form…
This is especially relevant to those of you doing Radley Physics Papers. Joking aside, knowing a little mathematical notation can be very helpful. Often a “back-of-the-envelope calculation” is enough to use as a guide to the sort of answer you might expect. Standard form is a way of expressing numbers as multiples of ten. It …
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Oily Fish…
I have eaten a lot of tinned sardines this week. Call me crazy but a warm baguette filled with good cheese and four oily sardines makes a great lunchtime snack. I prefer the ones packed in oil to the ones packed in tomato sauce but I am prepared to be open-minded on the issue. As …
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Symphony Of Science…
I was browsing the Symphony Of Science website and thought I would put one of the songs on here. They are videos of scientists talking about “Life, the Universe and Everything” but put to music. A program called Auto-Tune is used to turn normal spoken English into sung lyrics. It is the same technology that …
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