Tag: Physics

Chirp has a New Home

October 7, 2023

At the end of 2019, I posted about a little app that my colleagues and the University of Birmingham and I had been working on called Chirp — a web and iOS app for keeping track of the latest gravitational wave alerts. The COVID-19 pandemic shut down LIGO, and Chirp, but now it’s coming back...

My Top Tips for Preparing for a Physics Degree

August 10, 2015

You’ve just finished your A-levels, you say? Well done, I think you’ve earned a break so go on and enjoy it. However, I wouldn’t mind guessing that at some point in the next couple of months you’re going to get a little bit bored and might even start looking for something to do. If you’re kicking...

University is Over… for Now

June 12, 2015

It is a momentous day for me and rest of the remaining class of 2011 of the University of Exeter’s physics department. Today was our last ever results day. It was also the day where I found out, to my eternal delight, that the last 4 years have yielded a masters degree in physics; an...

Modeling Atmospheres with the Unified Model

February 24, 2015

In my last couple of posts I’ve been going through some of the basic principles of fluid mechanics. From some of the basic approximations that make the equation possible to analytically solve in this post, to some more specialised theory in the context of planetary systems in this post. In these posts we’ve been slowly...

Radiative Transfer in Planetary Atmospheres: An Overview

January 1, 2015

A little while ago I got carried away on a little post which discussed a really cool little bit of physics called radiative transfer. As I said then, radiative transfer is a technique that you can use to study how energy, in the form of electromagnetic radiation, moves through material. In that post, which you can...

Dust in the Ointment

October 18, 2014

It’s nice every now and then to have a slight reminder why your work is valuable. At the moment I’m part of a research team, working in the astrophysics department at the University of Exeter,  that are studying dust. I know exactly what you’re thinking, how interesting can dust be? The truth is that interstellar...

The Basics of Radiative Transfer

April 28, 2014

It’s deep in exam season for me at the moment, which means that if you try talking to me, chances are that I’ll have my head in a book. I talked a while back about solving radiative transfer problems with Monte Carlo methods, but I never actually went very far into how radiative transfer works....