Close to 1

In a quantum mechanics lecture last year, the subject of relative values came up. My lecturer said that a certain value was close to 1 then said in this example it was 2. To which one of the other students seemed quite confused and remarked about how he(my lecturer) had just said it was close to 1 to which my lecturer replied 2 is close to 1 it's not like it's a 1,000 or a 1,000,000. A bit of background my lecturer like pretty much all the lecturers at keele is an astronomer so he deals with very large numbers most of the time.

Now it might sound like the student was being very silly but thinking back at it there are an infinite number of values between 1 and 2 but you could say that about any value. I just thought it was interesting to think about the scales of numbers and how to say some value is close to another depends heavily on the context.

What makes a good teacher/lecturer?

(In this when I refer to teachers I mean teachers and lecturers by the way)

This is something I've often wondered about being in my 13th or so year in education I've had fair few of them. Some I have thoroughly enjoyed being thought by, some I've not so much enjoyed but the where good none the less. However some have been appalling. Teaching isn't just knowing the subject! It's about bringing it to life, or at least showing how it relates to it so I can see how it's useful to know.

For instance in high school I HATED maths now I'm going out of my way to learn it! I guess it just depends on the teacher.

I'm not sure about that comment though because I've had teachers that have been fantastic teaching one subject then teaching another was woeful. So is it having the right teacher for the right subject? Or is it that I didn't like the subject so was unwilling to learn?

Anyway back to the main point. Does a teacher have to enjoy the subject there teaching? I've noticed that when a teacher is teaching subjects closer to there interests they are much better! Having said that though I've had fantastic teachers when teaching something so far away from there subject of interest as to be in a completely different universe.

Let me know what you guys think makes a good teacher/lecturer!

Sleeplessness and sticky notes

I have trouble sleeping! When I got to try to get to sleep my mind starts thinking about a million and one things. I just can't switch off! Anyway I read a tip somewhere to keep sticky notes by you bed when your trying to sleep, so you can jot down what your thinking of and drift off to sleep.

I thought it seemed reasonable enough. However when I get rid of one thought another one happily bounds in to replace it. So I end up with a load of sticky notes all over my wall and I still cant sleep!

Not only that, I shouldn't have got cheap ones they kept falling off my wall on to my head, or just generally making a noise which isn't something you want when your trying to sleep. Not only that my mind wont let me just forget about the idea after I've just written down, it wants to expand on it. Ironically this post is one of these ideas. So I was kept awake by thinking about how I'm going to write about being kept awake by the things that are supposed to be helping me to get to sleep.

Unity

When in labs we where constructing a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram of the LMC(large magellanic cloud) from images, we where also given isochrones which where theoretical values that should relate to the stars in the LMC. It came to a point where we had to shift said isochrones by a value to make them roughly correspond to data points collected.

Most people around me got 23 or 24, so we asked the helper what the value should be? He replied about 23.5, to which one of my friends sounding quite annoyed with him self I didn't think of using a fractional number, to be far to him we where all thinking it.

It seems silly thinking about it now there where no reason not to use them but for some reason we all unconsciously enforced unity on our values. Yo might just think it's use but the quark model was held back for some time because people believed that charges only came in unit values(1,2 or 3) - or so Murray Gell-Mann says so.

It seems strange to me that we force ourselves to think that unity so some how more beautiful than fractions when they are completely arbitrary the fractional charges on quark is only because it was long ago that the charge on an electron and proton was declared as the elementary charge - and therefore 1.

Just thought it was interesting to think about...