Fortnight ending Saturday 4th July 2026. Read time: about 7 minutes.

This fortnight has been hot in all the wrong ways. The UK has just come through a run of record June temperatures, classrooms have done a convincing impression of storage heaters with windows, CERN has deliberately switched off the LHC, and cosmology has had one of those weeks where the foundations wobble and then partly un-wobble again. August’s near-total eclipse is also close enough to start feeling like departmental homework. Add in a fine Milky Way image, an ancient comet, the end of long wave, and a very decent quantum talk, and there is just enough physics here to distract from the fact that everyone’s brain has become soup.

The science story here is obvious enough: the Met Office issued red extreme-heat warnings, and June records kept falling. The school story is the one physics departments will actually remember. Government guidance was updated for schools during the heat, advising ventilation, shading, hydration and reduced vigorous activity, while reporting from around the UK showed closures, shortened days and classrooms reaching the sort of temperatures that make concentration a theoretical quantity.

There is also a very school-specific footnote to the heatwave. Tes reports that the DfE has been criticised by heads for sending questions to schools that closed or finished early during the late-June heat, with ASCL describing the message as lacking empathy. The line from government was that schools should stay open where safe, with practical adjustments for hydration, uniform and activity. The line from heads was more blunt: many buildings simply are not designed for sustained high temperatures, and “open” does not automatically mean “safe, effective learning”.

If you teach thermal physics or energy transfer, this is one of those inconvenient moments when insulation, airflow, radiant heating and specific heat stop being diagrams and start being timetable problems.

Source: Met Office, Department for Education, Reuters, Tes

CERN has switched off the LHC and begun Long Shutdown 3, the four-year engineering marathon that will turn the present machine into the High-Luminosity LHC. The headline detail is not “particle physics paused”, but that CERN is replacing and upgrading major sections of the machine so that the collider can deliver far more collisions once it restarts in 2030. That matters because high luminosity means better statistics, sharper Higgs measurements and a better chance of spotting rare processes rather than simply admiring how hard engineering is. Which, to be fair, is still quite admirable.

Source: CERN, CERN HiLumi LHC

A Nature paper, picked up by Scientific American, argues that DESI galaxy data may show persistent anisotropic structure on gigaparsec scales, which is the sort of sentence that makes cosmologists reach for both coffee and caution. It does not mean “textbooks obsolete by Friday”; even the coverage quotes sceptical experts pointing out that such a strong claim will need serious corroboration. Almost at the same time, Oxford publicised a different study arguing that the universe’s expansion is still accelerating after all, pushing back against recent claims that the supernova evidence had unravelled.

Classroom value: this is an unusually clean live example of how foundational models are tested, challenged, refined and very often not overthrown on first contact with a dramatic headline.

Source: Nature, Scientific American, Oxford Physics, Reuters

The third confirmed interstellar comet, 3I/ATLAS, now looks less like a curiosity and more like a chemical time capsule. Webb data reported by ESA, alongside the accompanying Nature paper, point to isotopic ratios unlike those in Solar System comets and suggest formation in a colder, older, more metal-poor environment billions of years before the Sun.

That makes it a beautiful object for reminding students that spectroscopy is not decorative astrophotography with added math; it is how we pry history out of light and ice.

Source: ESA, Nature

Scientists say they have settled a long-running argument about the Silverpit Crater beneath the North Sea. New seismic imaging, rock samples and simulations point to a hypervelocity impact around 43–46 million years ago, when an asteroid or comet roughly 160 metres wide struck the seabed. The impact is estimated to have thrown up a vast curtain of rock and water before generating a tsunami more than 100 metres high.

For physics teaching, it is a useful crossover story: waves, energy transfer, momentum, pressure, geological evidence and modelling all in one place. It also gives students a good example of how science changes its mind: Silverpit was once disputed as an impact crater, but better imaging and shocked minerals have shifted the evidence strongly in favour of the asteroid explanation.

Source: Sciencedaily/ Nature

The Royal Observatory Greenwich guide is exactly the sort of thing worth sending round a department before summer disappears. From the UK and Ireland, the 12 August eclipse will be partial rather than total, but still strikingly deep; Greenwich says around 90% coverage for much of the UK, and timeanddate’s London timings put first contact at 18:17 BST, maximum at 19:13 and the end at 20:06.

The usable classroom angle is simple: this gives you a real, near-future context for umbra/penumbra, orbital alignment, angular size and safe observation. Greenwich also provides safe viewing methods, including pinhole projection, which is the bit worth forwarding before someone suggests “just a quick glance”.

Source: Royal Observatory Greenwich, timeanddate

The end of Radio 4 on long wave is not only a broadcasting footnote; it is a very serviceable hook for GCSE waves. The closure story gives you a real reason to compare long-wave, FM and digital transmission, and to revisit why long wavelengths travel, diffract and cover terrain differently from shorter wavelengths. If you want a compact classroom link, this is the one: pupils know radio exists, almost none of them know why one transmission system could once blanket a country, and the physics underneath is refreshingly not hypothetical.

Source: WorldDAB, RSGB

ESA’s new Euclid image of the Milky Way’s crowded heart is the largest and most detailed visible-light photo yet made of our galaxy’s centre, containing more than 60 million stars. Better still, ESA explicitly connects it to exoplanet searches via microlensing.

For strong A-level students or enrichment, it is a gift: one image that opens discussion of resolution, field of view, gravitational lensing, observational strategy and the sheer reason astronomers like crowded star fields when planets are the quarry.

Source: ESA

For colleagues using Pearson Edexcel in other subjects as well as physics, Tes reported that marking of GCSE higher-tier maths paper 2 was briefly paused after issues with Pearson’s ePEN marking system. Pearson told Tes that checks were completed, marking resumed, completed work had been securely recorded throughout, and that there would be no impact on students’ results. It is, mercifully, not a physics-paper problem this time. It is still one more reminder that “the assessment system” is an alarming number of systems.

Source: Tes

In addition, Ofqual has issued Pearson with a Chief Regulator’s Rebuke over its 2025 A Level Maths papers. The issue was not the marking, but the paper design: Pearson reused 2022 contingency papers, some content was judged “unreasonably similar”, and the replacement second paper then created uneven topic coverage.

Ofqual says the results can still be trusted for university progression, and there is no change to student outcomes. Still, for physics teachers, this matters: A Level Maths sits underneath a lot of A Level Physics, and assessment confidence depends on papers being designed as a coherent set, not assembled like emergency cover work.

Source: Gov.uk

The useful AI story this fortnight is not a shiny app; it is the growing gap between use and structure. A recent report covered by TechRadar says only 2% of surveyed schools in England have a fully developed AI strategy, while the government’s own education AI roadmap says DfE and i.AI are developing education benchmarks and trialling curriculum-aligned, safe-by-design AI tutoring tools.

Practical angle: if your department is already using AI for quizzes, worksheets or admin, now is the time to agree clear boundaries. Decide what is allowed, what data should never be entered, and how staff will check that AI use is genuinely helpful rather than a substitute for judgement. The same applies to students: AI may support the process, but it cannot be accepted as evidence of understanding unless the student can explain the physics themselves.

Source: A roadmap for modern digital government, TechRadar, European Education Area

The Royal Observatory Greenwich eclipse live stream is already up, free, and scheduled for Wednesday 12 August from 18:15 to 19:30. This is the one to bookmark now and send to students later, because the odds of every family having proper eclipse glasses are lower than the odds of somebody claiming sunglasses will do. They will not.

<https://www.rmg.co.uk/whats-on/online/solar-eclipse-august-2026-uk-live-stream>

Source: Royal Observatory Greenwich

Physics teacher Simon Poliakoff has for the last two years been compiling Creative Commons sets of ideas for teaching physics sorted by topic, kindly supported by the Ogden Trust.  In June he shared a set of ideas for teaching Atomic and Nuclear Physics (including Quantum, Particle Physics and Medical Physics) which you can access here.  The format is a Google Slides document sorted by subtopic with one idea per slide (see example below).  Most of the ideas have a linked video, tips to make it actually work, and many of them also have additional resources linked.  Teachers and technicians can quickly flick through to find an idea that they would like to try.  It is potentially useful for trainees and ECTs as well as experienced teachers looking for new ideas to improve a scheme of work.

Sets of ideas for Waves, Forces, Magnetism and Electricity are also available from his website www.teachphysics.org

If you have any comments or additional ideas that you think he should add, please fill in this Google Form.  

Maria Violaris’s Royal Institution talk on quantum paradoxes is exactly what this slot is for: sharp, modern, conceptually serious, and not so mathematically dense that your best sixth formers will immediately fake a fire drill. The useful bit is that it treats paradoxes not as party tricks but as engines for real physics, linking measurement, entanglement and quantum computing without the usual mixture of mysticism and TED-voice.

Source: Royal Institution

If you are newer to teaching mechanics, the IOPSpark guide to using a ticker-timer to measure time is a very solid place to start. It tells you what apparatus you need, how to thread the tape properly, what power supply the timer should use, where students typically get muddled, and how to turn the resulting dots into something more useful than decorative paper damage. The valuable bit is the warning that many students find ticker-timers awkward and need time to become familiar with them. That is not a failure of the class; it is simply an honest description of ticker-timers.

Source: IOPSpark

Misconception: If 90% of the Sun is covered during a partial eclipse, it is basically safe to look at.

Better framing: Anything short of totality still requires proper solar viewing methods. Use eclipse glasses that meet the right standard, a solar telescope, or indirect projection such as a pinhole projector.

Why students get stuck: “Much dimmer” feels like “safe enough”. It isn’t. The Sun is still the Sun, which is annoyingly consistent about this.

Source: Royal Observatory Greenwich, Royal Observatory Greenwich Live Stream Page

Source: CERN, CERN HiLumi LHC

“I don’t expect that many people will be persuaded by the claims in the paper.”
— John Peacock, on the new anisotropy claim in cosmology

Source: 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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