photo credit: Bascom Hogue

Thanks to Irene

for alerting us all to this: until the end of November, the entirety of the Royal Society journals are free to access. Ever want to see the original Newton discussions? Bragg’s papers? How about Lennard-Jones? This is, quite frankly, a ridiculous thing for Royal Society Publishing to do, but I’ll take it! A huge number of important scientific discoveries are published in their archives that stretch way back from 1665 to present day. Here’s a few that might tickle your scientific pickle:

Lennard-Jones’ “On the Forces between Atoms and Ions”

Schrodinger’s “Contributions to Born’s New Theory of the Electromagnetic Field”

Born’s “On the Quantum Theory of the Electromagnetic Field”

Bragg’s “The Reflection of X-rays by Crystals”

Fermi’s “Artificial Radioactivity Produced by Neutron Bombardment”

Rutherford et. al discussing the Structure of Atomic Nuclei.

But don’t let me prescribe, go and have a look yourself!

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of turning this wordy blog into a photo-blog (phlog?), here are still more photos from the move. Kristy (our ‘line manager’, hi Kristy!) also mentioned that I’m making the whole moving thing out to sound like it’s monotonous, boring work akin to digging in a coal mine. Which it kind of is, but hey, it’s not that bad. Every day Rob makes sure we have something to do, and the hours fly by in between the constant shit giving and running up and down between levels. Plus next week we get to totter down to the new building and begin unpacking stuff! Expect photos of a pink bubble wrap paradise. (:

[Show as slideshow]

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This is probably

the easiest one so far if you’ve done a bit of physics sometime in the last decade. The experiment that resulted in the above hand sketched pattern (they didn’t have MSPaint back in those days) effectively ended the biggest argument in physics at the time. As usual, once you’ve had a guess you can check out what the image means right about here, or there’s a YouTube explanation here.

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I missed posting

this on Monday, but better late than never. This is actually five different images, all of the same instrument. Apologies for the crap quality, but you should still be able to guess what they are. You may even have used one of them recently, who knows? Here’s the only hint I’ll give: Galileo Galilei is thought to have been involved in its development, but not its invention. When you think you have the answer, click here to see if you were right and learn a bit about where they came from (and how science tends to work).

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In the interest

maintaining some regular features at this blog, I’m going to try out a new series of posts. Every Monday I will post an image from science and ask participants to try and identify what the image is before clicking on the link below it to discover the answer and hopefully learn something new. You can see today’s featured image above. There’s a very slight clue in the name of the image (first.gif), but if you want the full answer you can click right here to find out, and then here or here to find out more about the technique. It still blows me away to see the kind of apparatus pioneers of the field used, and how far we’ve come.

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