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 ...

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...

Memorial plaque in the Great Court of the University of Queensland today.

Equitable access to good education is a desirable goal. Yet it rarely happens and debate about how to achieve it can be diluted by focusing ...

Pierre-Gilles de Gennes  (1932-2007) was arguably the founder of soft matter as a research field, as recognized by  the Nobel Prize in Physi...

My wife and I started watching the series  The Chair , a comedy about an English department in an affluent liberal arts university in the No...

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...

Some people might expect me to be enthused that the Australian government recently announced  that the tuition costs for university degrees ...

A helpful starting point for me when considering universities after the pandemic is the cover story of The Economist , from two weeks ago, ...

There is a growing discussion of what changes might result from the pandemic: changes in societies, in institutions, and to us as individual...

 My economist son often listens to the podcast, Conversations with Tyler Cohen. We recently listened to a conversation with Esther Duflo , w...

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...

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...

For the past few months I have been travelling in North America and the UK, for a mixture of work and holiday. In a range of professional an...

I was recently asked to give a talk to an NGO about how universities are changing. There is no doubt that there are rapid changes, many for...

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...