Congratulations to Peter Wright, who will be starting a new job with State of the Art Acoustik in Ottawa at the beginning of January! Peter has been working as a research assistant with John de Bruyn for the last six months. He did his undergrad work here at Western, then got an M.Sc. from the University of Ottawa before returning to John’s group in July. Here Peter has been working on ultra-violet light scattering. In his new job, he’ll be modeling and designing room acoustics.
All posts by John de Bruyn
Congratulations, Masha!
M.Sc. student Masha Goiko’s poster on “Cellular Mechanisms of Force Generation in Antibody Mediated Phagocytosis” won first prize at the 2012 Infection and Immunity Research Forum which was held at Western last week. Masha’s research is co-supervised by John de Bruyn from Physics and Astronomy and Bryan Heit from Western’s Department of Microbiology and Immunology.
slower speed of light game
Here is a game from MIT that my son alerted me to, complete with Lorentz contractions. It appears to be free, but I haven’t tried it yet.
http://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light/
Now we’re cooking
Here’s a photo of world-famous chefs Will Handler and John de Bruyn with even-more-world-famous chef Andrew Wolwowicz from The Springs restaurant in London.
Andrew was guest chef at the November meeting of the London Chapter of Les Marmitons International, a cooking group that meets at Fanshawe College. Will and John we part of the team that cooked up the best Braised Beef Cheek Perogies with Savory Blueberry Sauce this side of Gdansk.
Why people study physics
Congratulations to Tahani Aldahri
Tahani successfully defended her M.Sc. thesis on Wednesday. Well done!
Which calculator would you buy?
My son found this image on facebook, or some such place. No wonder math is hard!
Canada excels in Physics and Astronomy
Here is a link to a press release about a new report from the Canadian Council of Academies on the state of science and technology in Canada. It says that Physics and Astronomy is one of six areas in which Canada excels. It also says that Canada’s scientific research was ranked 4th in the world in a survey of “leading international scientists.”
The Uses and Abuses of University
Here’s a provocative article from The Walrus about the mismatch between the Canadian university system and the needs of the economy: http://thewalrus.ca/the-uses-and-abuses-of-university/
colloquium Thursday
I just wanted to encourage folks to attend the colloquium by John Bush from MIT tomorrow. John is an excellent speaker, and he does beautiful (both aesthetically and scientifically) work. His talk is about experiments on a fluid dynamical system for which the equation of motion is the same as Schroedinger’s equation – so he is doing quantum mechanics via a table-top laboratory fluid dyanmics experiment.