Education

You need a postgraduate degree today

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According to the The Sutton Trust, the increase in number of postgraduate courses available in the UK, including masters degree, has meant that it is increasingly difficult for recent graduates with just a primary degree to enter the workplace.

A new Sutton Trust report, The Postgraduate Premium highlights this. You can find the report by following this link.

According to the report, 11% of 26-60 year-olds in the workforce now holds a postgraduate qualification, up from 4% in 1996.

The Sutton Trust is concerned that bright graduates from low and middle income backgrounds are increasingly priced out of postgraduate study, so these changes could widen income differentials and reduce opportunities for social mobility.

The Sutton Trust
The Sutton Trust is a foundation dedicated to improving social mobility through education. It has published over 120 research studies and funded and evaluated hundreds of programmes for young people of all ages, from early years through to Access to the Professions.

Link
Postgraduates earn £200,00 premium as basic degree no longer enough (The Sutton Trust)

General, Physics

The Higgs Prize

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An annual prize, named after Professor Peter Higgs, has been launched by Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond.

The prize offers outstanding young physicists the chance to win a trip to CERN and see the cutting-edge of international physics.

 higgs
Mathematisches Institut Oberwolfach (MFO)

We’re delighted that the Government intends to introduce this prize. With £8.5 billion of the Scottish economy created by physics-based businesses, the prize is recognition of the vital importance of the subject.

Professor Sir Peter Knight, President of IOP

Link
Higgs Prize to recognise outstanding young physicists in Scotland IOP News

General Mathematics, Physics, Research work

The Myth of Academic Excellence?

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Walter F.Wreszinski has written a short article called “The Myth of Academic Excellence and Scientific Curiosity” in the January 2013 edition of the News Bulletin of the International Association of Mathematical Physics [Wre]. It makes for some thought provoking reading…

The journals which we will call top A, of high “impact factor” (a rather controversial number analysed in detail in [Bin]), boast of high rejection indices, which reach 95 per cent, encouraging referees to recommend refusal in the almost totality of cases in order to justify this so important “measure of quality.” Thus, a major objective of these journals became the search for justifications to substantiate refusal, resulting in a one sided, and therefore unfair and unrealistic, view of the refereeing process.

Another interesting sentiment is quoted below.

We see that the main obstacle to the truth becoming known was the false concept of excellence associated to peer-review in top-A journals. A rejection to publish there leads to publication in a “non top A,” but this is equivalent to impart a label: the author did not succeed in publishing in top A, therefore the contribution is not first rate.

About Walter F.Wreszinski
Walter F.Wreszinski is a native of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and obtained his Ph.D. in 1973 at the Seminar für Theoretische Physik der ETH, Zürich, in the field of mathematical physics, having Prof. Dr. K. Hepp as thesis advisor. Since 1990 he has been full professor at the Departamento de Física Matemática, Instituto de Física, USP (University of São Paulo). His main research interests are mathematical statistical mechanics and quantum field theory.

Reference
[Bin] Mathias Binswanger, Sinnlose Wettbewerbe. Herder, 2010.

[Wre] Walter F.Wreszinski, The Myth of Academic Excellence and Scientic Curiosity, IAMP News Bulletin, January 2013 (pdf)

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Note added 06/02/2013: Wreszinski’s article also appeared in the Brazilian Journal of Physics December 2012

General

Proposed tax on sugary soft drinks

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60 organisations, including the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Healthare are calling for a 20p-per-litre tax on soft drinks to be included in this year’s Budget. This could raise up to £1bn a year in duty, which could be used to fund free fruit and healthy meals in schools. The tax could drive people towards no added sugar drinks.

pop
Image courtesy of Simon Cousins

A 330-millilitre can of sugary pop typically contains something like 35g of sugar, that is nine lumps. There are about 4 calories per gram of sugar, so that is 140 calories per can of sugary pop.

The Guideline Daily Amount (GDA) for sugar is 90 grams. That is less than three cans of sugary pop, which is in “old money” is a pint and a half.

Link
Call for soft drink sugar tax in Budget BBC News

Physics, Research work

Report on "From classical to quantum GR: applications to black holes" part II

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COST

I attended the winter school “From classical to quantum GR: applications to black holes” at the University of Sussex. The school was for three days over the 16th, 17th and 18th of January 2013. I posted a little about the event here.

The slides of the lectures are now available here.

The group photo

photo

A larger version of this photo can be found here

Once again I thank Xavier Calmet for organising the winter school, which turned out to be very wintery indeed.

Links
COST action black holes in a violent universe MP0905

Theoretical Particle Physics group at Sussex

Dr Xavier Calmet homepage

Winter school 2013 at Sussex

Education, General, Physics

How quantum physics democratised music, a lecture by lecture by Professor Sir Michael Berry

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How quantum physics democratised music

Date: Monday 4th March 2013
Venue: Institute of Physics, 76 Portland Place, London, W1B 1NT
Time: 18.30 (registration from 18.00)

sir berry
Professor Sir Michael Berry

“Connections between physics, technological invention, and aspects of human life that seem far from science, are both unexpected and unexpectedly common. And rather than flowing one way – from physics to gadgets – the connections form an intricate and subtle web, linking all aspects of human culture in a way that eludes our convenient intellectual categories.”

The lecture is free to attend and is open to all, physicists and non-physicists alike. You need to register at http://publiclectures2013.iop.org

The poster for the lecture can be found here (opens a PDF).

Note
The original message is from
Angela Townsend
Development Administration & HE Curriculum Support
Institute of Physics

Physics

Optical tractor beams can sort small particles

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Physicists in the Czech Republic have produced a simple example of an optical tractor beam using two laser beams [1]. Interestingly, they have also discovered a new technique for sorting microscopic particles.

abduction
We are not at the stage of lifting cows quite yet!

I posted a little about tractor beams before here, which employ a Bessel beam. Prof David Grier at New York University, published a paper last year announcing that they have experimentally demonstrated such a class of tractor beams [2].

What is new?
The work of the physicists at the Institute of Scientific Instruments of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic shows that a simpler version of a tractor beam is possible. Their tractor beam comprises of two laser beams brought to a focus with a lens, which can easily be done using a standard commercial microscope system. They found that by focusing the light inwards they could generate the same effect as if they had employed a Bessel beam.

We are not the first to demonstrate experimentally the motion of particles in a beam where the intensity is homogeneous, but our method is a little bit simpler and more straightforward than previous efforts.

Pavel Zemánek

Particle sorting
An unexpected effect is that the particles are pushed or pulled by the laser light depending on both the size of the particles and the polarization of the light. This allowed the researchers to separate mixtures of two different sized particles by changing the polarisation of the light.

The fact that the effect of the polarisation of lights is so prominent is surprising and for sure will lead to further research.

scotty
Scotty would be proud … (Image courtesy of http://en.memory-alpha.org)

Link
Optical tractor beam sorts tiny particles (Physics World)(Jan 24, 2013)

Reference
[1] O. Brzobohatý, V. Karásek, M. Šiler, L. Chvátal, T. Čižmár & P. Zemánek, Experimental demonstration of optical transport, sorting and self-arrangement using a ‘tractor beam’, Nature Photonics (2013) doi:10.1038/nphoton.2012.332 (Link)

[2] Optical conveyors: A class of active tractor beams, D. B. Ruffner and D. G. Grier, Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 163903 (2012) [5 pages]

Random thoughts on mathematics, physics and more…