Condensed concepts

 This semester, I am giving four lectures in a third-year undergraduate course on statistical mechanics. Last year, I gave a guest lecture ...

In Australia, scandals about the management of public universities continue to be covered in the media. A recent one is the use of billions ...

How do you learn to ride a bicycle? How do you teach someone to ride a bicycle? It is not easy to put this into words and that is an importa...

It all about values! Universities have changed dramatically over the course of my lifetime. Australian universities are receiving increasing...

A typical undergraduate course on statistical mechanics is arguably misleading because (unintentionally) it does not tell students several i...

In Australia, most Ph.D. students are fully funded by scholarships to allow them to focus on their research. This is unlike in the USA where...

  David Mermin has posted a preprint with the modest title, Autobiographical Notes of a Physicist There are many things I enjoyed and found...

 I have recently been doing something that many of you are probably already doing thanks to online teaching in the pandemic: using PowerPoin...

This week my wife and I did some science experiments with kids, aged about 8-12, at a holiday kids club organised by our church. The first d...

 When I was an undergraduate I loved taking courses in pure mathematics and physics. I never took the "Solid State Physics" course...

I keep coming back to the basic claim that the key ingredient of education is learning to think in particular ways. [n.b. In science, I am n...

I am working with a graduate student beginning research and she has asked this important question. I don't think there is a simple unive...

Over the past few decades, I have taught a wide range of courses in diverse contexts. Perhaps I have been slow to learn how to be a better t...

One of the greatest joys of teaching is having students ask questions that you do not know the answer to. In the last week of the course PHY...

One of the many concerns I have about uni versities, particularly in Australia, is the trend to compartmentalisation, factionalisation, fra...

I think one of the greatest moments of being a teacher or student is when the student understands or learns something that they find excitin...

About five years ago Massive On-Line Courses (MOOCs) were all the rage among politicians and university managers. Like most hyped up fashion...

Dimitri Mendeleev , who proposed the periodic table of the elements, purely from phenomenology and without quantum mechanics! He even succe...

The picture below is of Godel's rotating universe . It represents an exact solution to Einstein's gravitational field equations and ...

Four important goals to me are to teach students: 1. To think. 2. To think like a physicist. 3. To think like a condensed matter physicis...