This week, the 4th international conference on the history of physics finally took place at Trinity College Dublin. The event, supported by the Institute of Physics and the European Physics Society, was the fourth in an ongoing series of international conferences on the history of physics, a biennial series of meetings that aims to bring together professional historians and physicists with an interest in the history of their subject. It was a great pleasure to attend this particular conference of the series, as it had been postponed many times due to the Covid virus. Because the meeting was i ..read more

Friday marked the last teaching day of the semester at WIT and it also marked the last day of our college as an Institute of Technology. Today sees the first working day of the college as a constituent college of a new entity, the South East Technological University. There has been plenty of talk in the media about the wisdom (or not) of the upgrading of the Institutes of Technology in Ireland to the status of Technological Universities. I’m not sure I have anything to add to this, except to say that my understanding of the term Technological University is that it will allow the college to con ..read more

Like many third-level colleges in Ireland, WIT is set to resume face-to-face teaching next week. Thus the college will begin the second semester of the academic year at a time when the Covid infection rate is running at over 20,000 a day, surely close to peak Omicron. To be sure, there is little question that online learning is a poor substitute for face-to-face teaching – but the obvious solution is to delay the second semester for a few weeks, rather than put the health of many thousands of staff and students at unnecessary risk. One wonders why colleges have not explored this option. It’s n ..read more

Today marked the last day of our college Christmas break. I must say I quite enjoyed spending the break up here in Kilternan, Dublin, despite the scary onset of yet another variant of COVID-19. One welcome surprise was that a paper I had undertaken to write (for a NASA anthology on astronomical testing of Einstein’s theories) turned out to be very satisfying and took much less time to write than I expected. Sometimes procrastination is a good thing, I suspect my subconscious had been hard at work during the teaching semester! In any event, the article was pretty much all there once I sat down ..read more

This article appeared in The Irish Times on 30th September 2021 As the year 2021 progressed, a remarkable divergence between the global response to the Covid-19 pandemic and to climate change became ever more apparent. Considering Covid-19 first, there is little question that the tide has turned in this war. The use of selective lockdowns, masking and social distancing measures followed by widespread vaccination dramatically slowed the spread of the disease. Indeed, these measures proved so successful in countries like Ireland that some commentators have taken to criticising the Government fo ..read more

Yesterday, I participated in a virtual conference on the history of physics. The event, supported by the Institute of Physics and the European Physics Society, formed part of an ongoing series of international conferences on the history of physics, a series of conferences that aims to bring together professional historians and physicists with an interest in the history of their subject. I have been involved with the organization of these conferences for some time now and it was great to see this year’s version, an online conference, go off without a hitch. There were many interesting tal ..read more

This article of mine was pubished in The Irish Times on the last day of 2020. The year 2020 will probably be remembered as the year of the dreadful Covid-19 virus, but it should also be remembered as a year of significant triumph for modern science. While some had predicted that a vaccine for the virus might not be found for years, several successful vaccines were in fact developed within 12 months of the first emergence of the virus. In retrospect, the extraordinary speed of the development of a vaccine for Covid-19 can be attributed to a number of factors. The first was pressure – the devast ..read more

This article of mine appeared in The Irish Times on 26/10/2020. It’s hard to believe that it’s only seven months since the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19 first emerged. Quite apart from the tragic statistic of more than a million deaths worldwide, and the many people whose health has been seriously damaged, the virus has had a devastating impact on national economies and on employment. Early hopes that the virus would be quickly eliminated by lockdown proved optimistic. While such measures certainly slowed the infection rate, the gradual reopening of society soon caused infection rates ..read more

Today marked the first day back at work for academic staff at our college, Waterford Institute of Technology. From 9 am sharp, it was back to work with a maelstrom of meetings, meetings and more meetings; all remote of course, due to fears of a second surge of the virus in Ireland. I must say it was nice to see and hear colleagues again for the first time in months. I had a very productive summer in terms of research, but it’s nice to talk to other lecturers once again! The big news is that, as advertised in the media, almost lectures, tutorials and practicals in our college will be conducted ..read more

This article of mine was published in The Irish Times on July 23rd 2020. Following the outbreak of the Covid-19 virus, I noted in my last column in April most governments around the world paid close attention to the advice of medical experts and scientists. As a result, many nations soon managed to “flatten the curve”, i.e., to slow the rate of infections to manageable levels. Three months on, the situation is somewhat more complicated. No country can afford to stay locked down indefinitely, due to the spiralling costs of paid furlough and the threat of long-term unemployment and deep recessi ..read more