This week we have Einstein, telescopes and the fact that space is immense .

We have known about force for ages

but what exactly is it?

This one is easy right, we all know everything there is to know about energy

except... what it is!

These days radioactivity has a seriously bad rep. The problems at 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima demonstrate that when nuclear goes bad it does so in a spectacular and lethal fashion. Catastrophic really doesn't do it justice. 

In a way this is a real shame because now just saying the word radioactive is enough to make people shudder.  It is not a subject people want to go near and yet from a physics point of view, radioactivity, its discovery and study has lead to the most amazing leaps in our understanding of the physical universe.  

I thought today I would do a bit of a general post on atoms and atomic nuclei, which got me thinking about radioactivity and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). The first of these, radioactivity, I am going to post about here, the other, NMR, I'll do in a post shortly.

Hi Everyone

and welcome to this weeks podcast. Which is a bit of a strange one for me, because after 30 years, yes 3 zero years, 30 years Liverpool are once again the league champions. The last time they won I had a full head of dark hair and more energy than a Duracell battery.

I've been a Liverpool fan all my life and when I was a kid it was easy. I lived about a mile from Anfield, home of the mighty reds, so I could walk to the ground on match day. If I close my eyes I can still see every part of the journey in my mind.

When I was younger it was the quasar that made the papers much in the way that Black Holes tend to now. Over the years though the light of Quasars began to dim has the light of the Black Hole intensified and these days they seem to be hardly ever mentioned. Which is odd because they are still out there. In fact  the latest thinking from the astrophysicists is that each quasar has a super massive black hole at its centre.
 
We are not sure how those super massive balck holes form, but they are super, they are massive, and they may be black holes. 

If theories are correct, these blackholes have a mass ranging from hundreds of millions to billions of solar masses. 

The Quasar was, and still is, one of the greats of the heavens. If the data is correct then the stats for these fellows is truly awe inspiring. In fact the numbers are so large that they really are way beyond comprehension.

One of the most amazing things in physics is taught to us when we are kids, it is done in such a way that it passes right by.

it's time to give it the credit it deserves.

If you want to be a physicist or think like a physicist, trust no one. 

In this episode I explain why

Have you ever been hit by static electricity? or seen a cat covered in packing peanuts?  this one is about that.