Archive — Casual Physics Enjoyer

2026

10 Aug Suggested Experiment Equipment — A per-experiment build-and-buy list for the home lab.
7 Aug Johnson noise rig — full chat transcript — The full Claude Code Desktop session that sourced the parts for the Rodríguez-Luna & de Urquijo (Eur. J. Phys. 31, 675 (2010)) Boltzmann-constant circuit.
16 Jul Equilibrium points in Dyson's Toy Cell Model — When real analysis meets biology
14 Jul Better Temperature Control Of Algae? — It's too hot now to grow stuff at home. What's the fix?
11 Jul Measuring Milk Globule Sizes — It's not straightforward!
8 Jul What's the point of doing stuff — On reasons to do things
3 Jul In memoriam — In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.
1 Jul How To Read Something — The book is a block of wood. You don't stare at blocks of wood.
28 Jun Questions On Early Cell Membranes — Stuff I am confused about on origins of life... and rocks!
27 Jun The Questions I Always Think About — My current streams of research
24 Jun Preparing Algae for Experiments at Home — There was an attempt...
21 Jun LEAN For Checking my Math — Don't fool yo self
19 Jun Steady States in Dyson's Theory of the Cell — Using Markov chains to calculate equilibrium states in Dyson's cell model.
16 Jun What is the most intense way to learn something? — On giving talks
10 Jun Improved Tracking Of Brownian Milk Globules — My thought process in improving a Brownian motion dataset.
8 Jun The World Needs Replicators — Do science in your home so we know what's true.
5 Jun On a Tube Of Hot Gas — A rabbit hole of confusion on the Crookes radiometer and thermal physics.
1 Jun I Observed Some Brownian Motion At Home — Making a better dataset for diffusion relations with milk
30 May Join The Independent Science Society! — A New Kinda Science Society
28 May How Would An Intelligent System Do Physics? — On objects and regimes.
23 May The Particle Comes Alive — Modelling a Particle in a Thermal Bath; Langevin Dynamics
18 May Being Political in the Right Way — On reasoning about society.
14 May Do Not Plan — Steinbeck was right about Mice and Men
11 May Freeman Dyson’s Model of a Cell — Life and Death in Random Processes
4 May How to Write Better — Lessons from five years of shitposting.
30 Apr Excerpts — Karl Popper, Dyson, Sleep Quality and Cycling
27 Apr Why Read Faraday's Diary? — Excerpts and other thoughts
26 Apr A Thermodynamics For Biology — What genetic information can we get from macro state variables?
24 Apr It’s OK To Be Scared — Don't be in a rush to get screwed
23 Apr Fluid dynamics for Toddlers — A much simpler Navier-Stokes derivation. Mathematicians go f*** yourself.
20 Apr Making Rayleigh-Bénard Convection Cells — A simple self organising phenomenon!
18 Apr An Agentic Home Bioreactor — Making a Minimal Automated Home Lab.
17 Apr Kew Gardens, Turbulence, Statistical Mechanics, Bioreactors and Strength Training — More notes on cool things I've learned
14 Apr How To Get Cheaper Lab Equipment — Buying From China
13 Apr Daily Readings — 18th Century Collecting, Notebooks, Boiling Water, Thermodynamics and Orwell
12 Apr Posting More of My Thoughts — Revealling much more of my thought processes.
10 Apr The Best Town I've Been To. — Hay-on-Wye
8 Apr So My Friend Made Me A Bioreactor... — Testing David Jordan's tabletop bioreactor.
7 Apr How To Think About Dynamic Systems — Working with phase space
5 Apr The Triumph Of The Embryo — Some thoughts on Lewis Wolpert's embryology book.
4 Apr AI Agents to Organise My Secret Society's Dinners — Making an MCP server for event pages
3 Apr From Reversibility to Irreversibility — The biggest shift in the history of physics.
31 Mar How I Fixed my Headaches — Not medical advice
23 Mar Biology as Clockwork — Living systems as high temperature clocks.
9 Feb Being Maximally Useful Whilst Commuting — I hate commuting
7 Feb Trying to make an Automated Ecologist — A first pass through the Biotime dataset.
7 Feb Will Future Generations Think We're Gross? — Do we have limiting mindset about hygiene?
5 Feb PPE Stockpile Degradation — Is it just the elastic straps on masks?
28 Jan Safety And Danger — Why not both?
26 Jan So I got an EEG... — A weekend measuring my brainwaves.
24 Jan Bio-theory Lab Notes! — Growth Rates and Worm Posture
18 Jan How Can I Make Useful Knowledge? — On trying to be useful with words
8 Jan 20 References In Complexity Theory and Biology — Every biological system I've studied this winter.

2025

13 Dec Using Linear Algebra To Predict A Non-Linear Pendulum — An excruciating explainer into Koopman Operator methods for non-linear systems.
7 Dec Testing a cheaper laminar flow hood. — Cheaper home science.
4 Dec How To Find Time To Do Science — Tactics for working people doing science part-time.
2 Dec The Man I Want To Meet The Most — The Life Of Alfred Lee Loomis
29 Nov When Is A Complex System Stable? — Robert May, Random Matrix Theory, and Ecology
24 Nov I Made A Quieter Air Purifier. — The physics of sound, and the PC fan CR box v1.
18 Nov What's A Good Theory Of Biology? — Solving the 'many variables' problem.
12 Nov My UV Experiment Worked! — Improving the UV-yeast experiment with sterile technique.
4 Nov Write Clearly — What is clear writing?
30 Oct The Effect of UV Light On Yeast — Experiments teach you where to be suspicious of papers.
27 Oct Sneeze for the Camera Baby! — A new aerosol paradigm.
23 Oct Non Equilibrium Statistical Mechanics and Biology — Biology problems need new math.
22 Oct Why Independent Science Now? — Catalysts.
19 Oct 'How Life Works' by Philip Ball — Beware of metaphorical systems thinking in biology
15 Oct Making an Automated UV Sterilisation Pump — Build log
14 Oct I Managed To Grow Countable Yeast Colonies — A method to perform biology experiments at home
12 Oct Culturing Yeast For Independent Science Experiments — Will It Grow?!
8 Oct Do You Actually Hate It? — Or is it a 'you' problem?
7 Oct Evidence That Shrouds Increase CR Box Performance — Testing a well known modification to the DIY Air purifier with suprising results.
5 Oct A War in The Lake District — Greggs, the Lake Poets, Storm Amy, Cycling, and Sheep.
2 Oct Sealing my House Against Pathogens — Positive Pressure Build Log Part 2: Insulation Foam
30 Sep Bad Productivity Frameworks — I make new ones every day!
29 Sep Cycling the West Country — There's more to England than London
27 Sep Measuring my DIY Air Purifier — Cheaper and Better than commercial models? It's complex.
25 Sep The Ideas Factory? — Why I think the walking hypothesis is BS
24 Sep Dear Friends and Readers, Please Help — Give me anonymous feedback.
23 Sep Did I Just Make Quantum Dots? — A possible airflow visualiser
22 Sep Physics Departments At Risk Of Shutting Down — Coping with independent science.
20 Sep Trying to make a Cheaper Air Purifier — The Corsi-Rosenthal box.
19 Sep You Like Too Many Things. Now What? — Figuring out how to lean into my scattered thinking style
17 Sep A Cheaper Way to Test Ventilation Rates? — Using a baking soda volcano to see if I'm suffering from poor ventilation.
16 Sep Frying Eggs and Air Quality Tests — Equipment To Test Air at Home!
15 Sep I want to do experiments but its not cheap — Figuring out cheaper experiments would help independent science
14 Sep Noise Cancelling A Fan — To get more comfortable air quality.
12 Sep Dirt Cheap Holidays — On Bike touring
10 Sep Try to Prove Math With Computers — Walking through an example!
7 Sep You Need to Read Thomas Kuhn. — Pre-paradigmatic, normal and revolutionary
4 Sep Just get a Partial Fix and Move On. — You might find that this unblocks you!
3 Sep Computing Properties of Molecules. — Changing basis to make sense of a dimeric system.
1 Sep For Here Too, Gods Dwell — Finding research problems from the mundane
27 Aug Tolerating Confusion — But never accepting it
24 Aug How To Make More Friends — A common trait in those with wide and deep friendships
22 Aug We Should Formalise Physics — Why the PhysLEAN project is important
21 Aug Do Anything in 20 Minutes — One simple trick
19 Aug Models for Cleaning Air — Fluid physics is fun
18 Aug If It's Not Obvious, It Probably Isn't — And you should say it out loud.
17 Aug How to Easily Keep Something Alive — On trying to stop quitting.
9 Aug A Big Board of Problems — Would be valuable to both supervisors and independent researchers
30 Jul Teaching Cambridge-Level Math At Scale (Without Charging $150k) — At scale, the key lies in automated verification and proof assistants
15 Jul What I Learned from 500 Independent Scientists — Independent science is about to have its day in the Sun again.
9 Jul Try these Biosecurity Projects in your free time! — A list of biosecurity ideas for new independent researchers (including myself)!
27 Jun DIY Positive Pressure Build Log — Trying to bring the Swiss Alps to us!
26 Jun What is the Most Effective Day? — Deep work, prioritisation, and feedback.
9 Jun Can I use Air Pressure to Protect my House? — Calculating how much airflow I'll need to bio-harden my living room.
30 May Why Your Technical Expertise Might Not Be Your Greatest Asset — Why LLMs are pushing me from Quantum Theory to Coffee Chats
22 May Love isn't Physics, but popular advice acts like it is — A Physicist's Notes on Love
21 May What I use for Notes (and Publishing) — Obsidian / Obsidian Publish.
21 May Buyin' and Tryin' an Elastomeric Respirator — Face re(seal)
20 May MacOS ssh File System (SSHFS) — The biggest 'I wish I knew this earlier' when doing ssh workflows on small projects
19 May It's hard to know if I suck at writing — Reflecting on the impact of what I've written
18 May How to Start Modelling Airflow Ventilation — Gotta figure it out to model Far UVC!
13 May Calculations for Practical Heuristics in Far UVC Use — Getting started with a base case
5 May How do I achieve what I want? — Moving away from to-do lists
1 May Problems Trying to Model Far UVC in a Room — Trying to find what's hard about this approach to kill pathogens.
26 Apr Thought Blobs On Biosecurity Topics — My (slow) process learning about info-hazards, biosecurity books, history and lab leaks
9 Apr Let's Not Rawdog the Next Plague — A broad investigation on ways to help in biosecurity
7 Apr Contents
3 Apr A Two-Tier Model of Optimal Career Design — How I am scientifically designing my best strategy for living
29 Mar The Pain of Finding the Truth — Ways I am trying to not fool myself
21 Mar Three Skills of Virtue — How to use your time
19 Mar When To Trust Someone — Asking Aristotle, Dostoyevsky, and a sci-fi book for an answer
9 Mar Don't Agree To Things Too Easily — Having more conviction at house parties
3 Mar What do we do now? — Future-proofing my enjoyment in the advent of super-intelligence.
19 Feb The Professor and the Plumber — How I 'live' my problems
5 Feb London and the Country — A story of busyness versus intentionality
26 Jan Chicken Curry, Piece by Piece — How I solve problems.
20 Jan How my Life Changes — On mentorship.
14 Jan Slow Down. — Changing the pace of my life.
8 Jan Do I want to be Excellent? — If so, how?
3 Jan You're a Slow Thinker. Now what? — Figuring out how to lean in to my thinking style

2024

27 Dec Why Casual Conversation is So Hard — Why it's systemically hard to talk at your family function
22 Dec Don't Chase It — On ambition and avoiding the crowds
16 Dec Compulsion as a Tool — What I learnt crossing Sweden by bike
13 Dec On Good Writing — What I want to read.
10 Dec Scientists will become Data Harvesters — What is left to do when we are able to 'simulate everything'?
6 Dec Tediousness is Good. — On knowing what's important.
2 Dec Conquering the Molecules — Computational quantum chemistry is due for an explosion.
26 Nov When The Scientific Method Fails — A physicist's reflections on living life well through the skill of judgement, not hard-core empiricism .
19 Nov Calibrating Myself through Science Memoirs — Gene Machine - Venki Ramakrishnan's story of rivalry in ribosome chemistry
26 Oct Selecting Good Problems as a Part-Time Physics Researcher — On finding efficient ways of collecting good problems.
11 Sep Doing Research Part-Time is Great — Thoughts on doing casual physics research alongside my normal day job.
24 Jul Problems come from Dumb Questions — A New Comer's Difficulties in Biophysics - should it be this hard?
26 May Do Physics, But Learn History — Discovering the Drude model through the lens of a Historian.
7 Jan A Quantum Mechanics Problem on a Particle in a Line under an Electric Field. — Quick exercises inspired by hard problems.

2023

17 Aug Preliminary Thoughts on Solar Cell Efficiency — Computers are the future!
25 Jul Quantifying Wants, For Better Outcomes — Basic economics for slightly better decisions - know your utility function.
20 Jul Experiences with the Physics and Economics of Solar Cells in Malaysia — Reflections on ground-roots installation, to the mechanics of electrons in a lattice
6 Jul Solar Energy from the Sahara. — We probably have enough land on Earth to meet our energy demand from solar cells.
23 Jun Turning my Passion into a Job was a Bad Idea — The Disappointing Experiment of Writing a Book
29 May A Draft of some Start-up Ideas — In November, I put forward a speculative application to Entrepreneur First, a startup accelerator. I got an offer for their 2023 programme. Here are some the ideas I put forward.

2022

4 Jul Changing our Frame to Make Things Easier
25 Jun Thoughts on Gravitational Fields on Shells — Models for gravity on cool shapes!
20 Jun Physics Diaries #2 — Some ideas I have been playing around with recently.
15 Jun Cool Physics Stuff I Attempted today — What to do on a sick day...
5 Jun A List of Problems in Many Electron Systems
3 Jun Finding The Ground States of Quantum Systems
30 May Heisenberg Spin Chains — Finding low energy states in chains of atoms.
28 May The Energy of an Electron Hopping Model — I create a numerical simulation of the hubbard model.
23 May How do Loops change Physics? — An Example of Renormalisation in a Simple Scattering Problem
17 May An Example of a "Partially Fair" Model — I create a toy example of fairness in a machine learning model.
13 May More Thoughts on Space Solar Energy — A first pass at calculating energy prices from a solar based system in space.
10 May A TL-DR for Basic Group Theory — My previous essays have described the role of symmetry and order in physics. Whilst the lines between mathematics and physics are now incredibly blurred, the science of classifying symmetries into rigorous and well-defined objects was primarily the domain
8 May Thoughts on Words and their Meaning — I wanted to explore if simpler, small scale models can give us any insight for answering questions about creativity, meaning and abstraction in images and in language. This post will be about using simple techniques in machine learning to offer some answe
2 May Redshift from Massive Objects — In this article, I wanted to discuss an intriguing property of black holes - they cause a redshift. This means that for observers far away from a black hole (or any other massive object, for that matter), the wavelength of the colours emitted is enlarged
30 Apr Measuring Disorder and Complexity — The 2021 Nobel Prize was awarded for recent triumphs in complex systems research. This is my take on complexity, fractals and scale physics.
27 Apr Noether’s Theorem and the Principle of Least Action — Physicists love to discover conserved quantities not only because of their profound philosophical consequences but also because of their use in solving equations.
25 Apr What is the Dollar Cost of Malaysia’s Racial Discrimination? — There doesn’t seem to be much literature out there that quantifies this cost of racism to the Malaysian economy. In this article, I will try to propose a model for a lower bound for the Ringgit cost of racial discrimination
24 Apr The Viability of Space Solar Energy — Earth-based Solar Panels aren’t “Ambitious” enough to be effective
23 Apr Will AI-enabled automation constitute more than half of the Gross World Product by 2100? — In this essay, I hope to build a reasonable forecast of the proportion of the world's gross product from AI-enabled automation by 2100.
22 Apr The Hopf-Fibration and a Four-Dimensional Sphere — Can a sphere in four-dimensions be constructed globally from lower dimensional objects?
18 Apr Electrodynamics Puzzles — Why do we care about electrodynamics? Electrodynamics is the study of magnetic and electric fields that stem from moving charges. It’s useful for pretty much everything in engineering to scientific instrumentation.
16 Apr Small Sample Bias and Data Ethics — Many older works of once recognised scientific literature are now being deemed unreliable due to small sample bias. An increasing amount of meta-analyses are identifying unreliable fields of study, citing lack of reproducibility in larger sample sizes.
12 Apr What is our natural Rate of Extinction? — Will we go extinct before we can see the current edge of our universe?
10 Apr Existential Risk and the Offence-Defence Balance. — On Ukraine, Effective Altruism, and Catastrophic Black Hole Destruction
9 Apr Slippage in Automated Market Makers — I wanted to take a leisurely detour from my usual world of theoretical physics. In this post, I will talk about order books and their increasingly popular DeFi alternative — Automated Market Makers.
20 Mar Density Functional Theory — Density functional theory is a way to understand the distribution of electrons in many-body systems that are more complex than hydrogen. It is a modern miracle of much value in the study of chemistry, physics and materials science.
29 Jan Time Crystals, Part II — In my previous post, I talked about time crystals. I find time crystals fascinating not just because of their flashy name, but also because they somewhat resemble a perpetual motion machine.

2021

31 Dec Time Crystals — In August, Google published a preprint on ArXiv, which detailed how they created a time crystal on a quantum computer.
25 Dec Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange — The goal of cryptography is to have two agents sharing a coded secret over some public channel. This secret has to be secure, which means that eavesdroppers shouldn’t be able to figure out what the secret is, even if they had the coded version.
23 Dec Computing a Feynman Diagram for the Magnetic g-Factor — Computing quantum level corrections to magnetic quantities in an electron.
19 Dec Phase Transitions in the Checkerboard State — How does the state look like when it’s transforming into the checkerboard phase? Is there some interesting behaviour at the limiting area when it collapses into a checkerboard state?
12 Oct Explaining Quantum Degeneracy — How do we even begin to organise the possible states a quantum system can have?
9 Oct Hydrogen and its Mysterious Energies — The story of Hydrogen is an extraordinarily subtle and mysterious one. Since the dawn of time, physicists have used Hydrogen to test out broader physical theories that can be used to explain our universe.
2 Oct The Economics of Intergalactic Trade — Part I — I am fascinated by the intersection of economics and physics. There are few better examples of this intersection than in 'The Theory of Interstellar Trade' (1978) by Paul Krugman¹.
30 Sep The Integer Quantum Hall Effect — Most of the time, we don't get to 'see' the results of quantum mechanics or general relativity coming out so obviously in an observation or an experiment. The phenomena are elusive is because the energy scales at which interesting phenomena occur are usua
24 Sep Geometry as the Theatre of Physics — In my modern physics classes, I learned the importance of understanding shapes. Shapes are essential because they set the stage where interesting physics can play out — they dictate the symmetry and dynamics of any physical system.
22 Sep Quantifying our Confidence in Statistical Models — The Confidence Interval — Newspapers try to inspire trust and credibility to their claims through the use of statistics. For the most part, it is often descriptive. Often, they are filler numbers, as newspapers need to convey that their articles are well researched. To this end, s
20 Sep Why do we have to combine Einstein's Relativity with Quantum Mechanics? — As an undergraduate, I had a sort of unshakeable trust in both physics and the scientists who had constructed it. My lectures in mechanics, quantum physics and fluid dynamics were structured.
18 Sep How do Physicists understand the different Phases of Matter?
17 Sep Using Natural Language Processing to visualise Uncertainty in News Content — As a physics geek, I have always been intrigued by quantitative analysis used in government. Whilst I agree that statistics and numbers are incapable of telling the whole story, it is still interesting to apply math and computer science in creative ways t
15 Sep The wonderful Math that powers Disney’s Animation — I used to think that the link between math and art has always been somewhat tenuous until I recently discovered the kinds of math the animation artists at Disney Studios have been working on.
12 Sep Finding Geometrical Beauty in Simple Physics
12 Sep Taming Infinities — Why is it possible to do Physics at all?
12 Sep Cheating Nash’s Game Theory, with Quantum Mechanics
11 Sep The baffling Differences between Classical and Quantum Mechanics