About

I am an academic in the Department of Physics, University of Surrey, doing computational soft matter research. This includes crystallisation, non-equilibrium dynamics and some biological physics too. I teach biological physics at Surrey, as well as some maths and scientific computing to physics undergrads in the Dept. All views expressed here are my own of course, not necessarily those of my employer.

For details of my research, scientific publications etc see my homepage, or my Google Scholar page. My Erdös number is (at most) 4.

The title of the blog is stolen from Jacques Monod, the pioneering and Nobel Prize winning scientist who wrote a book with this title  (or Le Hasard et la Nécessité in French). I really like the phrase, and as a physicist whose research almost all involves processes that random aspects but which of course obey physical laws, I think it is appropriate.

Title image is courtesy of Spiralz and Wikimedia. It shows living organisms, and both fluid mechanics and the physics of superposition.