Covid-19 and me

If I am honest the infamous virus has had very little effect on me. I don’t have any relatives who are likely to be affected (my beloved mum passed away last year). I don’t have any underlying health conditions and my life has been basically what it has always been. The only minor inconveniences have […]

REMS ‘AT HOME’: METEOROLOGY

‘And now, the weather’ Mr Peter Gibbs, Freelance Broadcaster, UK Peter Gibbs is a former BBC Weather Presenter and enthusiastic amateur gardener with more than 30 years’ experience as a professional Met Office forecaster. He chairs BBC Radio 4’s ‘Gardeners’ Question Time’ and is a regular reporter on the Radio 4 environment series ‘Costing the […]

REMS ‘AT HOME’: METEOROLOGY

Meteorological observations Mr David Richardson, European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, UK David Richardson is Head of the Evaluation Section at ECMWF. He has over 30 years’ experience in weather forecasting research and operations, including use and monitoring of the global observing system, development of numerical weather prediction models, ensemble forecasting, products and tools for […]

REMS ‘AT HOME’: METEOROLOGY

Atmospheric dynamics Professor Joanna Haigh, Imperial College London, UK Before her retirement in 2019 she was Professor of Atmospheric Physics at Imperial College London, and co-director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment. She is a former head of the Department of Physics at Imperial College London. She is also a Fellow […]

REMS ‘AT HOME’: METEOROLOGY

Thermal physics of the atmosphere Professor Maarten Ambaum, University of Reading, UK Maarten Ambaum is Professor of Atmospheric Physics and Dynamics at the University of Reading and former Head of Department at the Department of Meteorology in Reading. He has a degree in theoretical physics from the University of Utrecht, The Netherlands. His research interests […]

REMS ‘AT HOME’: METEOROLOGY

History – an introductory overview The emergence of numerical weather prediction: fulfilment of a dream and realisation of a fantasy Professor Peter Lynch, University College Dublin, Ireland Peter Lynch is an Irish meteorologist, mathematician, blogger and book author. His interests include numerical weather prediction, dynamic meteorology, Hamiltonian mechanics, the history of meteorology, and the popularisation […]

REMS ‘At Home’: Meteorology

The London & South East Branch of REMS organised a meeting in January 2020 as part of their highly popular series of ‘At Homes’. The topic on this occasion is Meteorology and this is a joint meeting with the Institute of Physics. There were presentations by industry-leading experts covering the historical aspects of modern-day meteorology, […]

IOP Materials and Characterisation Christmas Lecture 2019

Ripples of Gravity, Flashes of Light: The Dawn of Multi-Messenger Astrophysics Prof Martin Hendry, University of Glasgow, UK Introduction The first ever direct detection of gravitational waves by the LIGO and Virgo Scientific Collaborations, from the collision of two massive black holes more than a billion light years away, was widely hailed as the biggest […]

A review of “God’s Dice” by David Baddiel

I wanted to see the play for several reasons: 1) I am a physicist 2) I am a practising Roman Catholic 3) I find Alan Davies and David Baddiel very funny, normally I have never had a problem with being a Catholic and a physicist. To me quantum mechanics is so beautiful and weird that […]

An evening with an astronaut

Michael Foale My notes from the talk (if they don’t make sense then it is entirely my fault) Introduction to the talk by Martin Archer and Julie Keeble Dr Martin Archer (Space Physicist, Queen Mary University of London)@martinarcher He studies Earth’s space environment and how seemingly empty space is in fact an incredibly complex and […]