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Constellations
Many plays about science suffer from trying to do too much, telling a story while teaching science, but Nick Payne‘s two-hander “Constellations“, now on at the Royal Court Theatre in London, has science and a scientist at its center, adding to the drama, not distracting us with jargon or science fictional twists. “Constellations” is the…
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I think I’m a Bayesian. Am I wrong?
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Continuing my recent, seemingly interminable, series of too-technical posts on probability theory… To understand this one you’ll need to remember Bayes’ Theorem, and the resulting need for a Bayesian statistician to come up with an appropriate prior distribution to describe her state of knowledge in the absence of the experimental data she is considering, updated…
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Planck Warms Up
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Nearly two-and-a-half years after its launch, the end of ESA’s Planck mission has begun. (In fact, the BBC scooped the rest of the Planck collaboration itself with a story last week; you can read the UK take at the excellent Cardiff-led public Planck site.) Planck’s High-Frequency Instrument (HFI) instrument must be cooled to 0.1 degrees…
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Steve Rawlings
The astronomy community in the UK and beyond suffered a terrible blow last week with the passing of Steve Rawlings, Professor of Astrophysics at Oxford. I spent quite a lot of time in Oxford a few years ago, and was lucky to get to know Steve a bit. He had spent the last several years…
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Me, the BBC, and Stephen Hawking
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I made it back onto the BBC today, this time to discuss Stephen Hawking on his 70th birthday (most of the people more qualified than me are actually at a meeting in his honour in Cambridge). (Actually, my very first appearance on the BBC, which generated one of my very first blog posts, was to…
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The Controversy about Hypothesis Testing
I spent a quick couple of days last week at the The Controversy about Hypothesis Testing meeting in Madrid. The topic of the meeting was indeed the question of “hypothesis testing“, which I addressed in a post a few months ago: how do you choose between conflicting interpretations of data? The canonical version of this…
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Bluffing about Mars
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Saturday afternoon I received a call from a news producer at the BBC — could I come talk about the Mars Science Laboratory, launched earlier that day? This was a tough question, publicity-monger though I am: I don’t actually know anything about Mars. I suppose to people outside of the very broad field of “astronomy”,…
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Urban Sputnik, Live at Imperial
Urban Sputnik, our collaboration with Vanessa Harden and Dominic Southgate of Gammaroot Design is currently on display at Imperial College in the main entrance of the Norman Foster-designed business school, located on Exhibition Road in London, just up the street from the Science Museum, the V&A Museum and the Natural History Museum. I’ve discussed the…
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A Big Day for Dark Energy
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For the second time this decade, the Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded for cosmology, to Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess and Brian Schmidt. They are among the leaders of the teams that used the properties of supernovae — exploding stars — to measure the rate of expansion of the Universe over time. In so…
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Passion for Light
It’s been a busy few weeks, and that seems like a good excuse for my lack of posts. Since coming back from Scotland, I’ve been to: Paris, for our bi-monthly Planck Core Team meetings, discussing of the state of the data from the satellite, and of our ongoing processing of it; Cambridge, for yet more…
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