Vivat Libertas

...actually, the positive thinking sort of worked. Well, not quite, but sort of. What worked better for me wasn't trying to cultivate a happy happy shiny shiny attitude. It was doing what my body told me to do and getting some sleep. It was doing what my mind told me to do and getting out of the house to see some green space. It was seeing my amazing boyfriend and holding him, spending time with him, spending time just talking and making music and exploring new things. It was realising that I have really, really good friends, who care about me and actually want to spend time with me. It was realising that all of those things have been there since the beginning and I'm only just noticing them. It was going to parties and dancing badly and ending up covered in my friend's soft toys. It was diving deep into physics books and connecting with what made me love physics - with the strange and beautiful and elegant ways of viewing the world - and drawing on that to stud...

Neoclassical economics is failing. I would go so far as to say that this is no longer controversial; its flaws have been known about for many decades now. Many, many fields have sprung from this failure - I would say that this is an extremely good thing. Some readers might wonder why I'm writing about economics at all. Importantly, I'm not an economist and have no formal training in the subject - I'm a vaguely interested party. I'm about as qualified as the pub bore (or most politicians) to tell you about the efficacy of various models; the difference is that I know I'm out of my depth. I am going to be discussing the perception of one particular field within economics, based on my experience with related fields. A more general concern is: why talk about the economy at all? Everyone talks about the economy. Everyone else is fed up of hearing about the economy, fed up of hearing about why the economy means that the rich have to get richer and the poor have to...

...Gravitational waves?! Yes, you read that right. The universe is alive - or should be - with the sound of gravitational waves. I'm very late to the party, but the LIGO Scientific Collaboration have released a video of the "chirp" black holes make as they spiral in towards each other and merge. A low rumbling quickens and quickens until it becomes a high whoop, the sound of two black holes crashing into each other (this crashing is technically known as a merger). For a brief moment the black holes are bright enough to outshine all the stars in the universe. It's a beautiful moment. It's beautiful to be living in an age where we can hear these things. It's beautiful to be able to detect these events within months of each other. The universe is alive with sound and light in ways we are privileged to see today.

Despite the best efforts of science communicators everywhere, quantum woo is still prevalent, mostly peddled by annoying snake oil sellers and very much even on the fringes of pseudoscience. In that regard it's less harmful than, say, anti-vaccination propaganda or GMO scaremongering - which both have a far bigger platform. Unfortunately, its supporters are no less rabid. To them, quantum mechanics is a mystical tool which can allow you to do anything, and if you don't believe them, you're a fed. Yes, every practising physicist is now a fed. I was quite surprised by this as well. Quantum mechanics is actually fairly old and has its roots in the 19th century. Even what we think of as modern quantum mechanics was actually born in the 1920s and is at this point nearly a century old. Still, classical electromagnetism, which is about 150 years old, doesn't really have any accompanying woo (even if electricity and magnetism can be conceptually very difficult until you...

So, more rambling from me. I don't know why this is happening. A transformation has taken place in me - very slowly, to be sure, but it has taken place and it is terrifying . Yesterday I was volunteering at Z-arts in Hulme and spent a few hours being mobbed by tiny, adorable children who love robots. It was fun. I really enjoyed it. But it was...a bit weird, I guess? You see, I was a sciencey kid and my parents always used to take me to work on big arty or sciencey projects. Guess what I was doing? Yep, helping to run artsy, sciencey projects where we programmed a robot's light sensor and tested it out on patterns we drew ourselves. (I came up with the idea in 5 minutes after not being able to carry a mat bigger than I am and transport a trolley loaded with relatively pricey electrical goodies. It worked much better than expected.) It just feels a bit strange to me, because I still have very clear memories and feelings of being a child wondering at how awesome the univ...

I'm not very good at this reality business, me. When I was a little girl, I wanted to become a scientist. I used to daydream about being a proper grown-up student learning science. Then, of course, I grew up to be an angsty and annoying adolescent, but "being dead" and "science" were my two main goals. And then my brain decided to fuck out on me big time during my last two years of school, during which my grades plummeted, I actually had to work to do even moderately well compared to GCSEs, and I was rejected from my dream university. Yeah, sixth form sucked. Actually, I was rejected from four out of the five universities I applied to. Let me tell you, this does absolutely nothing for your confidence or self-esteem. I spent most of sixth form crying and feeling like a failure - clearly, I did not use my hard-won independence well at all. Only Manchester gave me an offer and it was 2 A*s and an A. Reader, I missed my offer. I worked so hard I fell ill for...

I should totally become a theoretical physicist. A cascade of things has happened at exactly the wrong time: my lab partner has been sick, I have a zillion deadlines, my copy of MATLAB doesn't work as revenge for me pirating it, scilab is being wholly uncooperative, and best of all, I don't understand second year lab! Truly, I am a genius! Anyway, I was happily sitting around playing with radioactive material (as you do) when the head of second year lab came up to us. We'd forgotten to arrange an interview, since they're not automatically assigned, and unless we did it today we'd be slapped with a huge penalty for lateness. You know, today. When I hadn't finished any of my analysis because I couldn't work scilab properly. Shit . My lab partner had to calm me down and help me do data analysis, since I was on the verge of an anxiety attack. Perfectly normal thing that happens on a Friday afternoon, you know. (And we still entered the errors wrong. F...

5 words a girl* never wants to hear: "My Matlab install's not working." *for girl, read lazy physics trash So I up and googled things and stumbled upon SciLab, which is good because it took like 10 minutes to install and looks a lot like Matlab on the surface. The documentation is plentiful (and man, I have never been more glad I can read French because about half the help documentation is French). This is good because I haven't done any serious data analysis since last June. Yes, it's been eight months since I've analysed lab data using a computer program. There are downsides to missing a semester of lab after all. I feel like such a noob! (on the plus, setting up scilab to take my data is about 1000 times easier now that I know how to program...but I now need to learn to get it to spit out nice graphs) Yay! By mucking around with style = a negative number I got it to plot points. But datafit is an actual function and I have to write actual code. ...

One of the reasons I really, really like doing physics is because it gives you an amazing bullshit filter, if you let it. All of a sudden the world becomes clear and sharp and deep, described by the beautiful and powerful language that is mathematics. Hopefully you learn the tools to tell the plausible from the just plain nonsense and try to base things on evidence. Because physics is shiny and wonderful and leaves people speechless, the awe of physics is popular and widely publicised. By and large, this is a good thing; I believe that everyone deserves the opportunity to learn not just for utility but for pleasure, and to learn whatever the hell they please. Unfortunately, because most people are averse to maths (this is an utter travesty; numbers aren't scary), most popular science books gloss over or ignore the mathematical foundation of physics, giving people misconceptions. Now add that to the wave of stupid people promoting things like quantum woo and what do you get? A bun...

There is magic in this world. We call it electricity. OK, before everyone yells at me, I don't actually  believe that electricity is magical. I do, however, believe that it's not exactly easy to get to grips with how it works, especially when you get to things like flux and Gauss's law and the idea of shielding conductors. This is based on my personal experience and the fact that out of 300 people in my year, a good proportion of us are having trouble with our electricity and magnetism course. My year isn't stupid; in fact, we're probably the brightest cohort in a while according to the metrics my university uses. I go to the university where they invented graphene and where Rutherford overturned the "plum pudding" model of the atom in his famous experiment. Not too shabby. It's not like we're a degree mill. Anyway, the point is that even very intelligent people get confused by electricity and magnetism. In my opinion, this is because the c...

As pseudoscientific woomongers will never cease to remind you, waves are everywhere. For once, they're right. Fundamentally, a wave can be defined as a disturbance that travels at some velocity v. These can be travelling waves (which are self-explanatory because, you know, they propagate from one place to another), standing waves (the usual example is a plucked guitar string - the string is fixed at 2 points and so the wave produced ends up interfering with itself), transverse waves (the wave oscillates perpendicular to the axis of propagation, as in a light wave), longitudinal waves (the wave oscillates along the axis of propagation, as in a sound wave), mechanical waves (the wave travels through a medium, as in ripples on a pond) and nonmechanical waves (for example, light again - it doesn't need a medium to travel through). In other words, waves are all around us, from light to sound to pressure waves to ripples on a pond. I might sound like a five-year-old at th...

Because equations are awesome. So, as most people might not know were it not for the Google Doodle, today's the 127th anniversary of Niels Bohr's birthday. I'm not going to talk about his life (mostly because I'm lazy, partly because the internet's got a wealth of information about him already), but I am  going to talk about the influence him and the other greats of physics have had on me. You might wonder how a bunch of dead white males from the first half of the twentieth century could possibly influence a sixteen-year-old girl - a sixteen-year-old girl, mind you, who hasn't even gone to university yet and whose knowledge of theoretical physics, and the maths behind it, is thus very limited. Moreover, that physics is relatively old - even the positron, the first evidence of antimatter, was discovered in 1932; the modern theory of antimatter itself originates in a 1928 paper by Paul Dirac . Even something as exotic as antimatter is ancient (not that it...

I don't really talk about this much. I probably should do, since it's quite interesting. I came across this tweet from Alom Shaha , talking about how having female role models doesn't make a difference to girls' appreciation of physics. Now, this is a massive problem - the ratio of men to women in physics is still quite skewed, but I'm getting off topic. He asked for thoughts, and since I have a big mouth and fairly good typing skills here's what I came up with . It sparked off a little bit of commenting, particularly when I mentioned the role of the media in telling girls to "shut up & look nice" . Two women, @RedRubia and @Queen_Claire , told me that nobody had ever told them they couldn't do maths and that they were very proud of being presentable lady geeks who had never thought that they should shut up, in which case, more power to them. @Original_Cindy  then claimed I was wrong (but hasn't actually put any evidence forth for th...