Academia
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The Talk I Gave on September 12
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More 25th anniversary thoughts and recollections. I was heading off to Durham, in the north of England — my first big talk now that I had started my permanent academic job. I arrived toward the end of the first day of the conference: September 11, 2001.
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25 & 60
Twenty-five years ago, I moved from San Francisco to the UK, from a fellowship at Berkeley to a permanent job at Imperial College, London. A lot has changed since then. I was 35; now I am 60. It was two weeks before 9/11; the world hasn’t seemed as open and free since. I arrived from…
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Around the world in 383 days
It’s been exactly two years since the start of our sabbatical year away from England, and almost a year since we returned. I’m only now understanding the shape of that year and the effect it had on me, my science, and my family. Imperial College has a competitive process for requesting sabbatical leave: you have…
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Planck: Demographics and Diversity
Another aspect of Planck’s legacy bears examining. A couple of months ago, the 2018 Gruber Prize in Cosmology was awarded to the Planck Satellite. This was (I think) a well-deserved honour for all of us who have worked on Planck during the more than 20 years since its conception, for a mission which confirmed a…
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(Almost) The end of Planck
This week, we released (most of) the final set of papers from the Planck collaboration — the long-awaited Planck 2018 results (which were originally meant to be the “Planck 2016 results”, but everything takes longer than you hope…), available on the ESA website as well as the arXiv. More importantly for many astrophysicists and cosmologists,…
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Leon Lucy, R.I.P.
I have the unfortunate duty of using this blog to announce the death a couple of weeks ago of Professor Leon B Lucy, who had been a Visiting Professor working here at Imperial College from 1998. Leon got his PhD in the early 1960s at the University of Manchester, and after postdoctoral positions in Europe…
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SOLE Survivor
I recently finished my last term lecturing our second-year Quantum Mechanics course, which I taught for five years. It’s a required class, a mathematical introduction to one of the most important set of ideas in all of physics, and really the basis for much of what we do, whether that’s astrophysics or particle physics or…
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meTube
Some time last year, Physics World magazine asked some of us to record videos discussing scientific topics in 100 seconds. Among others, I made one on cosmic inflation and another on what scientists can gain from blogging, which for some reason has just been posted to YouTube, and then tweeted about by FQXi (without which…
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Academic Blogging Still Dangerous?
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Nearly a decade ago, blogging was young, and its place in the academic world wasn’t clear. Back in 2005, I wrote about an anonymous article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, a so-called “advice” column admonishing academic job seekers to avoid blogging, mostly because it let the hiring committee find out things that had nothing…
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Teaching mistakes
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The academic year has begun, and I’m teaching our second-year Quantum Mechanics course again. I was pretty happy with last year’s version, and the students didn’t completely disagree. This year, there have been a few changes to the structure of the course — although not as much to the content as I might have liked…