Frightening physics films, a furry physics doodle and an epic pub crawl

(Courtesy: Sandbox Studio, Chicago with Ana Kova)

By Hamish Johnston

There are still 10 days to go until Halloween, but some physicists can’t resist getting into the spirit a bit early. Over at Symmetry, Kathryn Jepsen suggests a few scary physics films that would make for a spooky movie night on 31 October. They’re not actually real films, but rather a series of posters dreamt up at Chicago’s Sandbox Studio in collaboration with the illustrator Ana Kova. My favourite is Poltergauss (right), because trying to understand magnetism is terrifying.

Here at IOP Publishing we are very proud of our colleagues Matin Durrani and Liz Kalaugher who have recently published a book about the physics of animals called Furry Logic. They were in London this week to talk about the book and little did they know that in the audience Jessica Wade was drawing a fabulous doodle based on their talk, shown below.

Wade is a physicist based at Imperial College London, a city that figures heavily in “The world’s longest pub crawl”. Created by mathematicians at the University of Waterloo in Canada, the crawl is a much more fun version of the “travelling salesman problem”. It offers the shortest route connecting nearly 25,000 pubs in the UK – including Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man. I wonder if anyone has raised a pint in every last one?

Delightful doodle: drawings inspired by the physics of animals. Click to enlarge. (Courtesy: Jessica Wade)