Fergus Murray

Category: science

  • The Octet Rule

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    The Octet Rule expresses the idea that atoms like to have eight electrons in their outermost shell, known as the valence shell. This provides something like an explanation for many chemical phenomena – for a start, the noble gases which make up the right-most column of the Periodic Table don’t usually bond with anything at…

  • Magnet Mushroom

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    At the end of 2013 Sonny Hallett and I invented a game. We’re calling it Magnet Mushroom, and you can play it too if you have an iron or steel tray, a bunch of magnets and some small pieces made of iron or steel. We used a baking tray, a pack of polished magnetite from…

  • Recent Science Writing

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    I don’t always post everything I write here, so I thought I’d just share a link to some of my recent science writing. Most of these are things I wanted to make sure I understood well enough to explain them clearly to a class of 13 and 14 year olds. Ionic bonding Metallic bonding Rock…

  • Project Wild Thing

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    Now free to view. Kids in Britain don’t play outside so much these days. Where our parents were left to roam at will, and their parents wandered much further still, the children of the early twenty-first century are mostly kept indoors. It isn’t safe to go out – the traffic is dreadful, kids have terrible…

  • Ionic Bonding

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    What Ionic Bonding Is Ionic bonding is the type of chemical bonding that binds non-metals with metals, and occasionally other things*, forming ionic compounds. An ion is just an atom (or sometimes a molecule) with an overall electric charge – many atoms and molecules have exactly as many electrons as they have protons, so the charges cancel out; when that doesn’t hold true, we end up…

  • The Everyday Signs of Light Waves

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    Light, like all the basic constituents of our universe, seems to be made of waves. Waves that act a bit like particles, sometimes, but which spread out and interfere with each other just like other waves. It’s about 200 years since physicists finally agreed that light behaves like a wave, after Poisson proved himself wrong…

  • Iron Noder

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    This November I posted 30 finished pieces of writing on Everything2, on whatever I felt like writing about at the time. By doing so I completed the Iron Noder Challenge, which has been running every November since 2008. This was the first time I took part in earnest – making the effort to write and…

  • Reading about Thinking

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    This year I’ve found myself reading a bunch of books about the mind, the brain, and the nature of the self. For some reason I’m reading them all in parallel, picking one or the other depending on how I’m feeling on any given day, which is probably why I haven’t actually finished any of them…

  • The Rain in Carballo

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    I’ve been a little slow to start going through my photos from this Summer’s two-month trip around the Iberian peninsula. I stayed for about two weeks in the town of Carballo, which is 35km from A Coruña, 45km from Santiago de Compostela and 10km from the nearest beach. It’s a small, quiet town full of…

  • Climate Camp

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    Climate Camp (or the Camp for Climate Action, in full) is a reaction to the failures of our governments to take anything like the steps that science tells us will be necessary to avert catastrophic climate change, and to the failures of our democratic system to represent dissenting voices. When even majority opinions are readily…