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History, County by County
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What a joy to be able to show this map today: So much better than last time. I wept with joy and relief, and pride. (Courtesy The NY Times. Lots more very cool maps here.)
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Travel Karma
I’ve just spent a quick 36 hours in Italy, taking the role of External Examiner for a PhD defense at SISSA in Italy. I was very happy indeed to “confer the degree of Doctor Philosophiae” on a very worthy young scientist. But getting to and from Trieste was less pleasant. It started promisingly. En route,…
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Nobel 2008: Broken Symmetry
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The 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Nambu, Kobayashi and Maskawa. Nambu, although not exactly famous outside of physics circles, is one of the most influential theoretical particle physicists of the last half-century. He proposed the basis of quantum chromodynamics, which is the theory of how quarks interact to form subatomic particles…
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iCosmo
A quick pointer to Initiative for Cosmology (iCosmo). The website brings together a bunch of useful calculations for physical cosmology — relatively simple quantities like the relationship between redshift and distance, and also more complicated ones like the power spectrum of density perturbations (which tells us the distribution of galaxies on the largest scales in…
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The State of UK Physics (Wakeham)
The Wakeham Review on the state of UK Physics has been released. Andy Lawrence has a good executive summary and The Guardian an overview. It seems to be positive about the state of physics overall, but perhaps lacks the rage and invective the community was hoping for. I am travelling but will try to digest…
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Playing catch-up
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So, apologies for taking so long between posts. For now, I’ll blame twitter and its ADD version of blogging, because that at least lets me point to an interesting meeting that went on last week: the .Astronomy Conference on Networked Astronomy and the New Media. the conference brought together several related strands of astronomical computing,…
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Blogging the LHC
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I’m at a meeting in Cambridge this week, discussing details of the way matter is arranged in the Universe, and the insight that gives us into the fundamental physics of the Universe. Many of us have got up a bit early to watch the BBC coverage of the first beams at the LHC, since CERN’s…
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Stealing data?
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PAMELA (Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics) is a Russian-Italian satellite measuring the composition of cosmic rays. One of the motivations for the measurements is the indirect detection of dark matter — the very-weakly-interacting particles that make up about 25% of the matter in the Universe (with, as I’m sure you all know…
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Blog life
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Welcome to anyone one led here from Physics World’s Blog life column. This is a blog — so comments are encouraged (or you could click on the advertisements)!
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Science Debate 2008
It’s making the science-blogging rounds today that Obama has answered the questions posed as Science Debate 2008, questions on education, health care, stem cells and, of course, climate. He supports all the right scientific positions, and says several times that he will increase funding for basic research overall, but most importantly acknowledges and condemns the…
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