Women in Crystallography By Dr Kate Crennell http://www.physicshistory.org.uk/women/Pioneers/index.htm Crystallography, as a subject can be thought as starting in Australia between the years 1886 and 1909. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Henry_Bragg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lawrence_Bragg Sir William Henry Bragg (above left) OM, KBE, PRS (2 July 1862 – 12 March 1942) was a British physicist, chemist, mathematician and active sportsman who uniquely shared […]

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Daphne Jackson and Gillian Gehring, the first female physics professors in the UK By Professor Gillian Gehring The university of Sheffield G.Gehring@Sheffield.ac.uk http://www.shef.ac.uk/physics/people/ggehring http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/hr/equality/femaleprogression/portraits/gilliangehring http://www.wes.org.uk/content/gillian-gehring http://www.bristol.ac.uk/equalityanddiversity/gillian%20gehring/ Professor Gehring is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and remains extremely active within the University and beyond. She was the first, and to date only, […]

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Edith Stoney MA: Pioneer of medical physics By Professor Francis Duck f.duck@bath.ac.uk Edith was born on the 6th of January 1869 in Dublin. Her father, George Johnstone Stoney FRS was an eminent physicist who gave the electron its name in 1891 as the ‘fundamental unit quantity of electricity’. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Johnstone_Stoney The picture above left shows Edith […]

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Mary Somerville, and her work in astronomy and optics By Professor Allan Chapman, Fellow of Wadham College Oxford http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Chapman_%28historian%29 Professor Chapman is a historian with an interest in science and the history of science. Women have beeen interested in physics for a very long time despite the interference of men and one of the earliest […]

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Marie Curie Pioneer of Radioactivity By Professor Hélèn Langevin-Joliot (Granddaughter of Marie Curie) Hélène Langevin-Joliot (born 17 September 1927) is a French nuclear physicist. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A9l%C3%A8ne_Langevin-Joliot Madam Curie started out by being just an assistant but became very famous. On the way she had many difficulties to overcome. “I keep a sort of hope that this […]

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Lise Meitner (1878-1968): Pioneer of nuclear fission By Professer Gerald Lander Institute for Transuranium Elements, Karlsruhe, Germany & Institut Laue Langevin, Grenoble, France Lise Meitner was born on the 7th November 1878 in Leopoldstadt, Vienna, Austria, and she was the third of eight children. Her father, Philipp Meitner, was one of the first Jewish lawyers […]

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I was very privileged to be in the audience for this celebration of women in physics. As a teacher I have often heard the comment that “physics is a boy’s subject isn’t it”. Well this celebration shows it is just as much a girl’s subject as boys. You can read the Institute of physics own […]

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The EDEXCEL AS physics syllabus requires the AS physics students to undertake a visit or case study and write a report on the subject before carrying out a related experiment. This year they were asked to research and write about the properties of spider silk. You may be surprised but there is a connection with […]

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Applications of Particle Accelerators By Prof. Rob Edgecock, STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory Proof-of-principle: cheapest option! Electron acceleration: 10 to 20 MeV Built in DL EMMA Accelerator at Daresbury Laboratory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMMA_%28accelerator%29 The Electron Machine with Many Applications (EMMA) is a project at Daresbury Laboratory in the UK to build a linear non-scaling FFAG to accelerate electrons […]

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Computer Workshop http://atlas.physicsmasterclasses.org/en/wpath_teilchenid2.htm http://www.ep.ph.bham.ac.uk/twiki/bin/view/General/MinervaResources http://atlas-minerva.web.cern.ch/atlas-minerva/ Minerva is a Masterclass tool allowing students to learn more about the physics that goes on in the ATLAS detector at the LHC. Currently, Minerva has two scenarios. One a tried and tested, well established exercise, where students must analyse events, using information from all parts of the detector to […]

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