Fortnight ending Saturday 9th May 2026. Read time: about 7 minutes.

This fortnight: Pluto is once again pleading its case, CERN is preparing to make the LHC even more absurdly powerful, the muon may have decided to behave after all, and Boltzmann brains are back to make normal existential dread look rather under-ambitious. There is also some useful AI stuff, a visualisation of space-time, and a classic practical setup for newer physics teachers.

CERN has begun the electrical powering phase of its 95-metre-long Inner Triplet String test stand for the High-Luminosity LHC. The system is being cooled to cryogenic temperatures and powered circuit by circuit, acting as a full-scale rehearsal for the superconducting magnet systems that will sit near the future high-intensity collision regions.

The classroom link is pleasingly direct: magnetic fields, superconductivity, energy transfer, cryogenics, and particle accelerators all sitting in one real machine. A nice reminder that the “magnetic field around a wire” diagram on page one of the electromagnetism unit eventually becomes a 95-metre engineering headache under Geneva.

Source: CERN

Remember last year when everyone was banging on about a fifth fundamental force? Well, the long-running muon (g-2) puzzle has apparently become less rebellious. A recent report summarised in SciTechDaily explains that improved theoretical calculations now bring the muon’s magnetic moment back into agreement with the Standard Model.

This is a good A-level enrichment story because it shows the genuinely awkward middle ground between “new physics!” and “better calculation needed”. Students often see experiment and theory as clean opposites. The muon story is messier, and therefore much more honest: sometimes the anomaly is real, sometimes the model is incomplete, and sometimes the calculation was not yet good enough. Physics makes you check.

Source: SciTechDaily

A recent summary of a 2025 paper connected to the Boltzmann brain paradox revisits a very strange implication of statistical physics: if random fluctuations can produce organised states, could a brain with false memories be more likely than a real universe with a real past? The following is the first sentence of the abstract, and what a sentence it is!

Are your perceptions, memories and observations merely a statistical fluctuation arising from the thermal equilibrium of the universe, bearing no correlation to the actual past state of the universe?

For the classroom, this is not one for Year 9 after lunch. But for strong A-level students, perhaps at your Physics Society, it is a superb way into entropy, probability, the arrow of time, and the difference between time-symmetric microscopic laws and the very obvious fact that smashed mugs do not politely reassemble themselves. Carlos Rovelli, of The Arrow of Time fame, is also a coauthor.

Source: ScienceDaily

BBC Newsround covered the latest round of public interest in whether Pluto should be considered a planet again. The useful classroom point is not “children write letter, NASA responds”, charming though that is. It is that scientific categories are human-made, evidence-responsive, and sometimes rather awkward.

A quick GCSE or lower-school starter:

That last question is the gold. It turns “Pluto was demoted” into a discussion about how science classifies the natural world without pretending the labels fell out of the sky fully formed.

Source: BBC Newsround

If you haven’t heard already, Ofqual has confirmed that GCSE Physics and Combined Science students will continue to receive equation sheets in exams for the remaining lifetime of the current specifications, including exams from 2028 onwards and any resit opportunities. GCSE Mathematics formula sheets are also staying.

There are three practical bits for teachers. Exam boards must publish the relevant formulae and equation sheets by 1 September in the year before each exam series, provide clean copies with the exam papers, and avoid setting questions that can be answered simply by copying information from the sheet. In other words, the sheet is not going away, but neither is the need to teach students what the equations actually mean. Rearranging, units, substitution, selecting the right equation, and knowing when an answer is physically silly remain very much alive.

Source: Ofqual / GOV.UK

Scientific American reports that an amateur mathematician used ChatGPT to help make progress on a 60-year-old combinatorics problem, with Futurism also covering the claim that mathematicians see the result as a significant AI-assisted discovery. If Terenec Tao says it’s legit, then I’m on board!

For physics teachers, the practical lesson is not “AI can now do all the hard thinking”. It is closer to: AI can sometimes be useful for generating routes, analogies, possible proof strategies, or unexpected connections, but the final responsibility still sits with the human who understands, checks, and defends the argument.

Source: Scientific American and Futurism

One of the more interesting AI shifts in schools is not just students using LLMs to get help, but teachers using AI to build small, niche tools that would never have existed otherwise. Not because they are commercially viable. Not because anyone is going to write a five-year strategy document about them. Simply because a teacher had a very specific problem and can now, with enough persistence, make an app for it.

A lovely example this week comes from Richard Wood at UCS in Hampstead, who has built an interactive astronomy tool that lets students explore the observable universe, select stars, and add them to Hertzsprung–Russell and Hubble diagrams. It pulls in information from astronomical catalogues, including Gaia DR3 and SDSS, so students are not just looking at a static textbook plot; they are actively building the diagram from real objects and real data. That is a much better route into “what does this graph actually mean?” than simply showing them the finished shape and hoping awe does the rest.

The caveat is the same as ever: AI-built tools still need checking. The physics, the data handling, the axes, the labels, and the student tasks all need a subject specialist’s eye. But this is exactly where physics teachers are likely to be early movers. We already like a niche simulation, a slightly over-engineered spreadsheet, and a graph that only three people in the building fully appreciate. AI has just lowered the barrier between “someone should make that” and “I made that last night”.

Source: Mr Wood Physics Astro

Richard Dawkins has been writing about AI consciousness after extended conversations with Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, concluding that at least some AI systems may be conscious, even if they do not know it. The Guardian’s write-up is worth reading because it includes the useful counterweight: most experts quoted argue that Dawkins is being misled by fluent mimicry, with Anil Seth warning that he appears to be confusing intelligence with consciousness.

For schools, the practical point is not to settle the philosophy of mind between registration and period 1. It is to keep our classroom language precise. “The model generated”, “the tool predicted”, and “the system produced” are safer than “it thinks” or “it understands”. That distinction matters when we are asking students to separate evidence, reasoning, fluency and actual understanding — which, inconveniently, are not the same thing.

Source: The Guardian

The From First Principles podcast is a weekly video podcast hosted by Lester Nare and physicist Krishna Choudhary, PhD. The basic format is simple: take recent science stories, get past the headline, and build the explanation from the ground up. Recent episodes have covered physics, space, AI, energy, biotech, superconductivity, Artemis II, hidden galaxies, lunar agriculture, quantum sensors, and the science in Project Hail Mary.

For physics teachers, the appeal is that it sits in the useful middle ground between “here is a headline” and “here is a paper you do not have time to read”. Krishna brings the physics expertise; Lester plays the curious non-specialist well, asking the sort of questions students often ask when they are actually thinking. It is useful for teacher subject knowledge, sixth-form enrichment, or a commute listen that still feels vaguely like professional development.

Source: From First Principles

Space.com has put together a ranked list of the best sci-fi thriller films, including time travel, AI, causality loops and various things going wrong in a way that is narratively convenient and scientifically questionable.

This is not a lesson resource, I just think it’s fun!

Source: Space.com

ScienceClic’s A Way to Visualise General Relativity is a brilliant, albeit not new, one for anyone who has ever winced slightly at the rubber-sheet model of gravity. The video offers a cleaner visual route into curved spacetime, showing why objects appear to accelerate under gravity without leaning too hard on the slightly misleading “heavy ball on a trampoline” picture.

This is strong enrichment for Year 12 or Year 13 students, especially those who have met gravitational fields and are ready to see why “gravity is geometry” is more than a pleasing slogan. ScienceClic is consistently good at aiming for Feynman-esque understanding. Highly recommend you get the channel into your algo.

Source: YouTube / ScienceClic English

If you are newer to physics teaching, the IOPSpark guide to measuring (g) with an electronic timer is a genuinely useful walkthrough of a classic practical. It covers the release mechanism, timing system, trip switch, and the awkward little delays that can make the data look worse than the teacher’s confidence.

The key practical point is that the timing delay is not just an inconvenience; it is a teachable systematic error. The guide suggests using the data structure properly rather than hoping one “perfect” drop will rescue the experiment. It is a good setup for GCSE required practical skills and a neat bridge into A-level treatment of uncertainty, gradients and experimental design.

Source: IOPSpark

Misconception: Balanced forces mean an object must stop moving.

Better framing: Balanced forces mean zero resultant force, so the object has zero acceleration. It may be stationary, or it may continue moving at constant velocity.

Why students get stuck: In everyday life, moving objects usually slow down because resistive forces are everywhere. Students quietly build the rule “motion needs a force” because that is what bikes, footballs and classroom trolleys seem to tell them. Newton then arrives, quite rudely, and says the opposite.

Source: The Physics Classroom

What this means:

The further a planet is from the Sun, the longer its orbit takes. Not just because it has further to travel, but because it also moves more slowly. Gravity is weaker at larger distances, so the required orbital speed is lower.

The pleasing part is that the mass of the orbiting body cancels. A satellite, planet, or small physics teacher all obey the same orbital period relation if placed at the same orbital radius around the same central mass.

Source: LibreText Physics

“Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.”

— David L. Goodstein, States of Matter - Introductory paragraph to the textbook

Source: Goodstein, States of Matter

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