Hardly a week goes by without some phenomenon in the natural world attracting my attention—the behaviour of waves and clouds, light and shade, animals and plants. There’s a great deal of physics going on out there, hidden in plain sight. Sometimes I can puzzle out what I’m seeing, sometimes I can look it up, sometimes I just go away baffled.

At the turn of the millennium, I wrote a series of columns about this stuff in The Scotsman newspaper, entitled “Just Phenomenal”. You used to be able to find some of them on the newspaper’s website, and then for a while 26 of the original articles were archived behind a subscription wall at the now-defunct HighBeam Research. But now they’re all gone.

After that, I produced some similar articles and columns for Wanderlust magazine.

I enjoy researching these things, so I plan on blogging here about a few topics relating to natural phenomena. There will also be the inevitable book recommendations.