Dominic Williams Science Tutoring

20/08/2026

Good luck to all my Welsh GCSE students for your results today. Here's to all your hard work paying off.

17/08/2026

Congratulations to all my WJEC A-level pupils on some great results.
Particular mention goes to those who have allowed me to publicly share their success:
Elgan achieved an A in Chemistry
Ffion achieved an A in Biology
Hattie achieved an A* in Chemistry plus three more A*s in other subjects.
Jac achieved an A in Biology

There have also been a host of other A and B grades at both A2 and AS levels. You know who you are. I wish all of you the very best for the future as you move on to bigger and better things including, amongst other subjects, degrees in Veterinary Science and Aerospace Engineering.
To those continuing their studies with me in September, it's onwards and upwards to build on what you have already achieved.
Well done to all! I'm having a very proud tutor moment.

13/08/2026

Good luck to all my Welsh A-level students with their results today. I look forward to finding out how you all did.

22/07/2026

Fair.
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19/07/2026

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The blue haze is an electron. Not a dot circling a nucleus like a planet. A cloud of probability, photographed.

For a century, physics insisted this image was impossible. The uncertainty principle says you cannot pin down an electron's position and momentum at once, and the act of measuring it collapses the very state you were trying to see. Look at an electron and you destroy the answer.

So researchers cheated brilliantly. They could not photograph one atom repeatedly without wrecking it, so they photographed thousands of identical hydrogen atoms, one shot each. They used lasers to excite each atom until its electron escaped, then let a strong electric field guide it onto a detector. Every atom contributed a single point of light. Stack tens of thousands of those points together and the cloud emerges, exactly as quantum mechanics predicted decades earlier.

What you are seeing is not one electron's path. It is the shape of where the electron could be, made visible.

Those rings and nodes in the image are the wavefunction itself. The dark gaps are places the electron will never appear, not because something blocks it, but because the mathematics forbids it. A wave interfering with itself around a proton.

And then there is the emptiness. If a hydrogen atom were scaled up to the size of a football stadium, the nucleus would be a grain of rice at the center, and the electron would be a fuzzy possibility somewhere in the stands. Everything else is nothing.

You are made of these. Roughly ten percent of your body is hydrogen, mostly locked into the water in your cells. And nearly every hydrogen atom in you formed in the first few minutes after the Big Bang, almost 14 billion years ago, before a single star existed. Nothing has ever made more of it since.

So this picture is a portrait of the oldest matter in existence, taken by creatures assembled from it.

Does seeing the atom as a cloud instead of a tiny solar system change how solid the world feels to you?

06/06/2026

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DNA is written in four chemical letters called nucleobases: adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine. RNA uses uracil instead of thymine. For decades, scientists had found some of these bases in meteorites. The question was whether all five existed in space or whether some required Earth's specific chemistry to form.

In 2022, researchers analysing samples from three carbon-rich meteorites, including material from the Murchison meteorite that fell in Australia, detected all five nucleobases for the first time. The complete molecular alphabet of life, found in rocks that formed in the early solar system billions of years before Earth had any biology.

This does not mean life came from space in the direct sense of organisms travelling between planets. What it suggests is something more fundamental: that the chemical building blocks required to construct genetic molecules are not rare or Earth-specific. They form naturally in space through chemistry driven by radiation, temperature, and the basic elements present throughout the universe.

The theory that life's ingredients arrived on Earth via meteorite bombardment is called panspermia in its broader form. A more conservative version, that organic chemistry from space seeded Earth's early oceans and contributed to the origin of life, has been gaining scientific traction for years.

The early Earth was being relentlessly bombarded by asteroids and comets during a period called the Late Heavy Bombardment. Those impacts would have delivered enormous quantities of organic material to the surface, including amino acids, sugars, and now confirmed nucleobases, into the warm shallow oceans where life is thought to have originated.

Life on Earth may not have started from scratch on a blank planet. It may have assembled itself from a molecular toolkit that arrived from the stars, fell into the ocean, and found the right conditions to begin doing something extraordinary.

The universe was already carrying the instructions. Earth just provided the lab.

09/05/2026

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Light takes time to travel. And across cosmic distances that delay becomes something almost philosophical.

A civilization 2,000 light-years away pointing a powerful telescope at Earth right now is not seeing our present. They are seeing our past. The light arriving at their telescopes today left Earth 2,000 years ago, carrying the image of Roman legions, the Colosseum under construction, Jesus walking through Judea. To them that is happening right now.

And this works in every direction simultaneously.

A civilization 65 million light-years away is currently watching the asteroid impact that ended the dinosaurs. The actual event. The sky darkening. The fires spreading across continents. The worst single day in the history of complex life on Earth is arriving at their telescopes as breaking news right now in 2026.

A civilization 4.5 billion light-years away would point their telescope at our region of space and see nothing. Our Sun had not yet formed. The atoms that would eventually become Earth were still scattered across an interstellar cloud drifting through a younger galaxy.

Now flip it. The light leaving Earth at this exact moment is beginning a 2,000 year journey outward in every direction. Whatever is 2,000 light-years away will receive it in the year 4026. They will see our cities, our satellites, our signals. They will see 2026 and have no idea what comes next for us.

Neither do we.

The universe is not just a place. It is a time machine in every direction. Every star you see tonight is a different era. The night sky is not a snapshot. It is a layered archive of everything that ever happened, still traveling outward at the speed of light, forever.

Nothing is ever truly gone. It just becomes very far away.

08/05/2026

Science exams begin on Monday for many of my students. A handful have already started practical exams. I'd like to wish everybody all the best for the coming weeks as the exam season gets into full swing.