Fortnight ending Saturday 20th June 2026. Read time: about 7 minutes.

This fortnight has an admirably mixed temperament. Time crystals have edged a little closer to real devices, JWST has handed the “little red dots” mystery a rather black-hole-shaped answer, cosmologists have been reminded that one provocative maths paper is not the same thing as a revolution, and UK physics funding keeps managing the impressive trick of being both strategic and alarming at the same time. There is also some exam-board wobble, a useful IOP cluster worth bookmarking, and one or two genuinely mind-bending reads for the lunch break you probably won’t get.

A recent New Scientist piece looks at whether a quantum state could be made to last indefinitely. Researchers at Aalto University connected a continuous time crystal to a mechanical system and showed that its behaviour could be controlled. This is not free energy or a challenge to thermodynamics, but it does suggest that time crystals are becoming something physicists can study and use rather than simply a strange theoretical idea.

For strong sixth formers, it offers an interesting route into symmetry breaking, energy states and why repeated motion does not necessarily mean energy is being created.

Source: New Scientist, ScienceDaily

The James Webb story on little red dots has sharpened nicely. NASA says Webb now has its strongest evidence yet that at least one of these objects, GLIMPSE-17775, is a “black hole star”: a rapidly feeding supermassive black hole wrapped in a dense cocoon of gas. The spectrum is the key bit here. NASA reports more than 40 spectral lines, with several independent indicators lining up with that black-hole-plus-gas model.

For the classroom, this provides a useful link to spectroscopy, redshift and how models of the early universe are tested. It is also a good reminder that astronomers often learn far more from analysing spectra than from the images themselves.

Source: NASA, Space.com

The recent dark-energy story is interesting, but should be read with some caution. A recent pys.org report on a new Proceedings of the Royal Society A paper says mathematicians at UC Davis have derived instabilities in the Friedmann-style picture used in standard cosmology and argue that accelerated expansion may not require dark energy after all. That is interesting. It is also very much not the same as “dark energy debunked”.

For teachers, this is probably best used as a live example of how theoretical physics actually works: assumptions matter, mathematical consistency matters, and a challenge to a dominant model is a starting gun for scrutiny, not a trumpet fanfare for instant replacement. If you run an enrichment club, this is the sort of story that rewards careful reading rather than headline faith. Which, admittedly, spoils some of the internet’s fun.

Source: Phys.org, Proceedings of the Royal Society A

The Brian Cox funding-cuts story matters because it is not only about universities. The Royal Astronomical Society says proposed STFC reductions of up to 30% across astronomy, particle physics and nuclear physics have triggered a Westminster pushback involving Cox, Chris Lintott, Catherine Heymans and others. The IOP has separately warned that foundational areas of physics have already faced damaging cuts and says decisions on deeper scenarios are approaching quickly. RAS reporting also cites a survey in which nearly 80% of early-career researchers said they were considering leaving the UK. If you teach physics as a living subject rather than a set of old answers, this is the pipeline story to watch: fewer opportunities upstream eventually change what students imagine physics can be downstream.

Source: Royal Astronomical Society, Institute of Physics

If you have A-level classes still needing sane, physics-specific support rather than generic “engagement”, the IOP Teaching 16–19 Physics programme is one of the better uses of a bookmark. The current run is free, online, and explicitly built around teaching strategies, misconceptions, worked examples and challenging topics; the associated IOPSpark events page also makes it easy to spot what is live right now. This is particularly worth a look if you are teaching outside your comfort zone, mentoring an ECT, or simply tired of recreating perfectly good explanations because your planning folder has achieved archaeological status. It is teacher-useful in the unfashionable but important sense of actually helping with teaching physics.

Source: IOPSpark, IOPSpark Events

If you are staffing a department, nudging a technician-turned-teacher, or talking to that colleague who keeps saying “I have actually thought about retraining…”, the IOP Teacher Training Scholarships are still one of the clearest routes worth pointing at. The IOP says it is offering 175 scholarships, each with £31,000 tax-free funding plus mentoring and CPD support. On the same practical note, the 6th Annual Birmingham Physics Education Conference is on 1 July for experienced physics specialists and 2 July for trainees, ECTs or non-physicists, and the Schools and Colleges Affiliation Scheme remains a strikingly modest £50 a year for UK and Irish schools. Some offers really are cheaper than a misplaced practical order.

Source: Institute of Physics, IOPSpark Events, Institute of Physics

For colleagues in Wales, or anyone near enough to borrow good ideas without shame, the IOP’s Boosting Science Education in Wales programme looks worth attention. The IOP says it is backed by the Welsh Government and run in partnership with the Royal Society of Chemistry and Science Made Simple, with the stated aim of building confidence, supporting practice and strengthening science education. The linked events page also shows a South Wales Secondary Science Day on 30 June and a North Wales day on 3 July. If you are the sort of person who occasionally wonders whether your subject knowledge needs a tune-up but would prefer that not to resemble a punishment, this looks promising.

Source: Institute of Physics, IOPSpark Events

There has been more exam-paper wobble than anyone really needs in June. Tes reported that students sitting AQA foundation GCSE maths paper three received higher-tier inserts, with AQA apologising and promising to explain before results day how it has ensured that no learners are disadvantaged. Then Tes reported a separate issue: mistakes were found in “all versions” of a GCSE science paper, and AQA said it had reported the matter to Ofqual. This lands in the shadow of April’s Ofqual decision to fine OCR £270,000 over 2025 AS and A-level physics paper errors that affected over 14,000 students and led some to receive the wrong grades. It is not a cheerful cluster, but it is one worth clocking.

Source: Tes, Tes, Ofqual

The broader numbers are worth noticing too. Ofqual’s provisional summer 2026 entries show GCSE physics down 1.0% to 161,305 entries, A-level physics up 1.8% to 42,765, and AS physics down 9.9% to 2,715. Tes’ coverage is useful for the wider shape of subject popularity, but for physics departments the main message is fairly plain: A-level physics is holding up better than AS, while the broader post-16 pipeline still looks more fragile than triumphant.

Source: Ofqual, Tes

The Science News piece on AI and an Erdős problem is more useful for teachers than the chest-beating takes that followed it. The headline result is real enough: an OpenAI model generated a proof that external mathematicians checked, and the work has been treated by serious mathematicians as a genuine milestone. But the classroom takeaway is not “AI is now the mathematician”; it is that verification has become even more central. Quanta’s recent piece on Terry Tao and automated proof-checkers is the valuable companion read here. Practical angle: if students use AI to attack hard problems, insist on arguments that can be audited line by line. Caveat: even in frontier mathematics, the impressive bit is the combination of creativity and checking, not creativity alone in a nice font.

Source: Science News, OpenAI, Quanta Magazine

One more technology story belongs in the staffroom, even if it sits slightly to the side of physics proper. The government has opened a call for evidence on screen use for children aged 5 to 16 and says the work will inform parental guidance and future school policy. At the same time, the under-16s social media plans have moved quickly, with the Parliamentary briefing and the Guardian’s overview both making clear that educational services such as Google Classroom are expected to be exempt, while age or functionality restrictions for under-16s are now the direction of travel. The physics-teacher angle is awkward but real: a lot of pupils do meet useful explainers, worked examples and astronomy clips on platforms that are not designed as classrooms. My own view is that this will only feel sensible if schools and teachers help pupils swap algorithmic drift for better-curated study routes, rather than pretending those routes already magically exist.

Source: GOV.UK, UK Parliament, The Guardian

The ban on social media for students under 16 has now been announced.

What does this look like in practice? I think that it is important to distinguish between the type of social media that students use to communicate with each other and post content, and the type of platform that YouTube predominantly is.

TikTok and Instagram serve up an endless feed of short-form content, based on algorithms designed to keep the user on the app. YouTube, especially through long-form video, is used more as a deliberate search engine to find solutions to problems.

Looking to Australia, and the way that the social media ban has worked there since 2025, it is still possible for students to watch videos hosted on YouTube. The key point is that, as I understand the new proposals, students would not be logged in with their own accounts, so they could not comment on videos or subscribe to channels to receive more suggested content.

There are still many unanswered questions. For example, should students under the age of 16 be directed towards YouTube videos by their teachers to support homework? What about websites that embed YouTube videos, including Isaac Science? Will individual schools impose a blanket ban on YouTube videos through their internet settings?

As a former teacher, and now a full-time ‘YouTuber’, I am not too worried about the ban at this time. I feel that solutions will be found by YouTube, teachers and students so that educational videos remain accessible. Other educational creators and I are looking closely at the developing regulations so that we can best support students on the platforms they choose to use.

So, before the ban comes in, don’t forget to like and subscribe!

Lewis Matheson runs the YouTube channel Physics Online, which has more than 200,000 subscribers, as well as websites for GCSE and A-level Physics, with embedded videos hosted on Vimeo.

This MIT lecture by Allan Adams is one of the clearest introductions to quantum superposition I have seen. Rather than beginning with heavy mathematics, Adams uses a series of simple thought experiments involving imaginary “colour” and “hardness” boxes to show why classical explanations fail. It is pitched beyond A-level, but confident sixth formers should find it accessible and genuinely thought-provoking.

Source: MIT OpenCourseWare

Misconception: A time crystal is basically a perpetual motion machine.

Better framing: A time crystal shows persistent periodic behaviour in a quantum system, but it does not provide unlimited extractable work, and it does not overturn thermodynamics.

Why students get stuck: The phrase “lasts forever” invites exactly the wrong mental model. Media language suggests spinning wheels and free energy; the actual physics is about symmetry, quantum states and what counts as equilibrium.

Source: ScienceDaily

…and if you couldn’t follow all that, then what kind of physics teacher are you!? 😅

Source: M. Coleman Miller

“Currently, I spend part of my time trying to tell people … that the chances of you living 50 [more] years are very small…”
— David Gross, speaking to Live Science

Source: Live Science, Scientific American

The Physics Staffroom is a human–AI collaboration. AI helps gather and format material, but each issue’s selection, verification, editing, design, and regular features are all done by a humble, human physics teacher! 🤓

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