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Betelgeuse, Gamow, and a Big Red Horse

There has been a lot of talk recently of Betelgeuse possibly going supernova this century or not...

Climate Change, the Walrus and the Carpenter

I have recently watched two videos on climate change by Sabine Hossenfelder.  The first one...

A Very Large Hadron Collider?

Frontpage image: Illustration of spherical explosion (kilonova) of two neutron stars (AT2017gfo/GW170817)...

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Robert H OlleyRSS Feed of this column.

Until recently, I worked in the Polymer Physics Group of the Physics Department at the University of Reading.

I would describe myself as a Polymer Morphologist. I am not an astronaut,

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In Anglo-Saxon orthography, so we understand, the letters "ge" often represented the sound "ye".  With that little bit of information, you should have no trouble in construing the following:


And if you want to go back a bit further in time, here is my idea of a Christmas greeting:


The Wrong Kind of Snow has struck again.  As this New Scientist article relates, on the 6th of February 1991, trains in South-Eastern England were brought to a halt.  When British Rail announced that this was caused by "the wrong kind of snow", people thought that this was simply the mother of all official excuses.  But it was true: fine, dry, powdery snow had indeed been sucked into the works of the electric trains, and caused the


One of the beauties of spiral galaxies is bursts of blue-and-red hydrogen light from newly-born clusters of stars.  In the 19th century a poetically similar outburst of creativity occurred in Naples, which not only transformed Italian popular music, but propelled by recordings of Enrico Caruso and Mario Lanza among others, has since warmed hearts across the globe.

La Canzone Napoletana is understood to have taken off in 1835 with the song Te voglio bbene assaie by Raffaele Sacco (1787 –1872), who as well as being a poet was also an inventor of optical instruments.  The particular song I am
Look what's happening in Britain! 

I have just been reading a newspaper article:  Climate change belief given same legal status as religion  which starts:
An executive has won the right to sue his employer on the basis that he was unfairly dismissed for his green views after a judge ruled that environmentalism had the same weight in law as religious and philosophical beliefs.
Where does one draw the boundary between science and politics? Here in Dear Old Blighty, our Home Secretary has just sacked his chief drugs adviser over this very issue. If you care to read the article, Cannabis row drugs adviser sacked, please let me know what you think.

Just over a year ago, the Daresbury synchrotron closed down (Is The Ring Destined For The Cracks Of Doom?) and I was contemplating the prospect of travelling to THE Continent (OK, the European mainland) in order to continue our Small-angle X-ray scattering work.