Student blogs

I’ve been taking part in a Bloomberg journalism class over the past couple of weekends, and this week the homework was to write a blog about our real passion: what we would still spend our time doing if we had all the money we wanted. As you might have suspected, mine is science, so this seemed like an ideal blog for me to post here as well…

Super-energetic super-massive black holes spinning billions of light years apart, from across opposite ends of the universe, seem to have somehow aligned themselves. Time freezes as your spaceship approaches such a black hole.

A digital worm is currently being created that will be an exact cell-for-cell copy of the real thing.

Read Science! in full

So, the other day I had my first comprehensive tutorial. I’ve mentioned them before—they are the two three hour papers on the last three years of Physics that strike fear into everyone’s hearts. Since the start of term I’d heard people discussing their revision plans for them, which is always a terrifying conversation to overhear, especially when you haven’t even looked at a paper!

Comprehensives are actually supposed to be a selling point of an Imperial Physics degree I think, because they are all about whether you actually can do Physics not just remember stuff for a one-off exam. Of course, that’s what makes them scary—I think to some extent everyone thinks that their good exam results are a very improbable fluke—or maybe that’s just me… 😛

Anyway, the paper we looked at in my first tutorial was actually much less scary then I expected.

Read The Dreaded Comprehensives in full

This week’s blog is actually about Imperial third year…I’ve been writing so much about other stuff this term that anyone reading this thinking of applying to here is probably under the impression that we don’t do any work at all!

Third year Physics consists of three core courses: ‘Light and Matter’, ‘Physics of the Universe’ and ‘Fluid Dynamics’. I am doing LM this term—so far it is a continuation of Atomic Physics from last year—an in-depth look at what goes on inside real atoms and how they interact with light. It has two more parts about light and magnetic fields interacting with solids, which look like a continuation of Solid State.

Read Third Year Physics Overview in full

This is a quick catch-up blog about a couple of weekends ago, which was another busy one!

On the Friday night I helped out with Science London for the first time at the RI lates evening—I helped run a speed-dating event with a scientific twist! It was a pretty fun event to help out on, though leaving the email about it open on my boyfriend’s computer did lead to some confusion 😛

 Anyway, there is a theory that we are more attracted to people that look similar to us, so we matched people up based on facial matching software as well as their preferences during the regular speed-dating.

Read Go-karts & the science of attraction <3 in full