Fortnight ending Saturday 25th April 2026. Read time: about 7 minutes.

A quick thank you to all the new supporters from the first issue. The response from the community has been overwhelming! Thank you for all the subscriptions, sharing, and feedback. I hope it continues to be genuinely useful (and at least mildly entertaining). If you know of any other fellow physics nerds who might enjoy the newsletter, please do share 🙏

Right, enough dithering. let’s get into it!

If this fortnight had a theme, it was this: nature still refuses to tidy up after itself. Gravity’s “constant” is being awkward again, the Sun is flinging particles around in ways the models did not quite order, and the Universe is still expanding with a level of inconsistency that would get a Year 9 graph sent back for a redo. There is also some genuinely useful teacher tips this week, which I hope you’ll enjoy!

A decade-long measurement effort at NIST has produced a new value for the gravitational constant, G = (6.67387 ± 0.00038) ×10⁻¹¹ m³ kg⁻¹ s⁻². However, it still does not resolve the long-standing disagreement between high-precision measurements. The classroom gift here is obvious: this is a superb real-world reminder that science is not just “plug numbers into equations”, but also uncertainty, replication, and the occasional mild existential sigh. The write-up below is especially useful because it cleanly separates big G from little g at the end, which students are forever trying to merge into one inconvenient blob.

Source: NIST

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe caught a magnetic reconnection event in the solar wind and found something awkward for the simple story: protons and heavy ions were not accelerated in the same way. The protons spread out more like a torch beam, while the heavier ions were much more tightly directed. That matters for solar-storm modelling, but it is also a lovely classroom reminder that field ideas are not decorative diagrams; they cash out in particle motion, energy transfer, and technology-relevant space weather. This links neatly to GCSE and A-Level electromagnetism.

Source: NASA Science

A new community-built analysis from the International Space Science Institute and the H₀ Distance Network puts the local Hubble constant at 73.50 ± 0.81 km s⁻¹ Mpc⁻¹, with just over 1% precision, and finds that no single local-distance method dominates the result. In plainer English: the disagreement with early-Universe estimates is still there, and the “maybe one local method was just off” argument is getting less convincing. The proper version is in the Astronomy & Astrophysics paper, while Futurism’s explainer is the brisker version for a quick skim. This is an excellent story for discussing models, inference chains, and why “constant” does not mean “trivial to measure”.

Source: International Space Science Institute

If you have somehow missed Dr Jones Physics, his apps page is worth your attention. Here you will find an ever-growing number of useful simulations and apps by topic — including heat, electricity, astrophysics, and states of matter - and the wider site is explicitly built around sharing physics ideas for use in class, including the PTNC forum, and tonnes of useful physics YouTube videos organised by topic. I used the Doppler app this week with Year 11s revising Space, and it worked a treat!

Source: Dr Jones Physics

There’s nothing more useful than a group of people with a similar interest sharing memes and complaining about exam boards. But seriously, if you want a place to ask questions, get advice, and connect with other physics teachers, the Schrödinger’s Chat WhatsApp group is an incredibly supportive and active community. Justin from Doctor P 4 Physics has been curating this group of like-minded nerds with the aim of spreading all things good in physics.

Source: DoctorP4Physics

Research published by Cambridge University Press & Assessment in May 2025 threw up several interesting statistics, including this particularly sobering one: just 7% of students who achieve a grade 7 at GCSE go on to secure an A or A* at A Level. For students with 7–7 in Combined Science, that figure drops to just 2%. Certainly gives you something to talk about at A-level open days!

Source: Cambridge University Press & Assessment

In a paper from August 2025 titled Consequences of Undecidability in Physics on the Theory of Everything, Dr Faizal et al. discuss how limits associated with Gödel, Tarski, and Chaitin bear on the idea of a wholly algorithmic “Theory of Everything”. This is not classroom news, but it is the sort of physics-adjacent rabbit hole that may appeal to anyone who enjoys seeing logic, metaphysics, and fundamental physics share a slightly uneasy table. If that sounds like your kind of tea-break detour, the following article on the paper is an entertaining read.

Source: arXiv

Your straight A* student has just sent you a tough Olympiad problem and, naturally, in some parallel universe where teachers have spare time, you would knock it out in five minutes, coz you is well good at physics ‘n’ that. In this universe, however, you are a teacher, which means you do not have two minutes, but you would still quite like to help.

Many of us have turned to our new AI overlords in moments like this, and, to be fair, large language models are now increasingly good at producing beautifully structured, well-reasoned, and most importantly, correct answers to these sorts of technical problems. The only snag is that, when you copy and paste the response from your LLM of choice into Word or an email, all the nicely formatted equations usually collapse into typographical soup.

Enter LaTeX and Overleaf to save the day! Ask ChatGPT, or whoever, to output its solution in LaTeX code. Copy that code snippet into Overleaf, which is a free online LaTeX editor and compiler. Bish bash bosh: you have properly formatted, beautifully structured mathematics, a clean PDF to download, and something legible you can send to your student, confident in the knowledge that you could definitely have answered it yourself, if only you had had the time!

The practical AI story this fortnight is not hype but boundaries. The UK government has invited companies to build and test AI tutoring tools for Years 9–10, including science, with trials in schools from this summer and teacher supervision built into the design. At the same time, JCQ’s guidance remains very clear: assessed work must still be demonstrably the student’s own, unacknowledged AI use is malpractice, and teachers must not use AI as the sole means of marking. If you saw that slightly surreal MSN headline about Henry Shevlin joining Google DeepMind’s full-time staff with the job title ‘philosopher’, this is the useful school-level translation: the adults building AI are worrying about human-AI relationships, too, so it would be wise if schools did the same. Practical use for low-stakes retrieval or tutoring may grow; for anything assessed, keep the line bright enough to see from orbit.

Source: GOV.UK

OCR’s A-level Physics exams have been brought back into focus after Ofqual confirmed a £270,000 fine for errors in the 2025 AS and A-level papers. The regulator identified 12 mistakes across questions and mark schemes, affecting over 14,000 students, with some errors only discovered after results day, leading to 37 students having their grades increased. As reported in recent coverage, concerns raised by students about exam difficulty sit alongside these findings, but Ofqual’s action centres on accuracy and quality control: the papers were judged not “fit for purpose”, with weaknesses in checking processes and arrangements for correcting errors.

Source: Ofqual

If you want something current, shareable, and highly inspiring, go with Advice From Top Olympiad Students from Physics Online. The useful bit is that the advice is recognisably real: lots of practice, lots of getting stuck, and not much mystical nonsense. This is one to send to a Year 11, 12 or Year 13 group that thinks top-end physics success comes from being naturally brilliant rather than repeatedly being wrong in productive ways.

Source: YouTube/ Physics Online

Misconception: Big G and little g are the same thing.

Better framing: Little g describes the acceleration that an object experiences due to the gravitational pull of a large mass, such as Earth, and it varies from location to location. For instance, the value of little g is approximately 9.8 m/s² at Earth’s surface but only 1.62 m/s² on the Moon because the Moon has a lower mass and therefore exerts a weaker gravitational pull than Earth.

In contrast, big G is universal: Its value is the same everywhere in the universe, to the best of scientists’ knowledge…

Why students get stuck: They meet both in the same topic at A Level, both wear the same letter, and textbooks often move from one to the other at speed. The notation is doing students no favours here.

Source: NIST

If you are newer to sixth-form teaching and have an electron diffraction tube sitting in a cupboard looking faintly accusatory, the IOPSpark pages on electron diffraction tube and electron diffraction are genuinely useful. They explain the wiring as two simple circuits, insist on the right safety basics - protective resistor, shrouded leads, wait for the EHT to fall to zero - and then walk you through the core moves: 6.3 V heater, earthed negative terminal, roughly 4.5 kV accelerating voltage, magnet to distort the rings, and voltage changes to show the ring diameter shrink. It is exactly the kind of demo newer teachers avoid until someone sensible shows them that it is manageable.

The following video from Physics Online also gives you a fantastic visual walkthrough

Source: IOPSpark

If you teach wave-particle duality, this is the neat result behind the electron diffraction tube: why the ring diameter falls like one over the square root of the accelerating voltage.

That is why the rings contract when the accelerating voltage rises.

How to teach it clearly: first get students to predict the trend qualitatively, “more energy, shorter wavelength, less diffraction”, and then show the algebra.

Source: IOPSpark

“People who boast about their IQ are losers.”

— Stephen Hawking

Source: NYT

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