Academia
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Raiding the science coffers
In the last couple of weeks, the UK Government has announced that the Department of Trade and Industry is so far in the red that it has cut £68 million from the science budget. Usually, government finance isn’t a zero-sum game. But this year, to pay for payouts having to do with the collapse of…
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Science In, On and Around the Media
Neil Tyson of New York’s Museum of Natural History had an excellent appearance on The Daily Show where he reminds us that “Astrophysicists are a simple people“. John Stewart flipped between slack-jawed incomprehension and good jokes. Better science than most of the real news. Speaking of the media and science, I spent Tuesday night boozing…
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Yet another PhD
Congratulations to David Dawe, who passed his thesis exam today for his work on “The Dynamics of and Gravitational Radiation from Supermassive Black Holes in Galactic Nuclei”. His research starts from the premise that most galaxies harbor very massive black holes (each millions or billions times the mass of the sun). We also know that…
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The Carbon Budget of Cosmology
Antony Lewis over at CosmoCoffee has started a discussion of the environmental impact of scientists’ travel to conferences. Is this excusable, perhaps necessary, behavior, or a profligate waste of carbon? Sure, conferences are fun, especially when they’re in Taipei or Trieste, but I sometimes wonder whether those hours in the conference rooms are worth the…
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The Guardian: Ivy Ceilings and Human Spaceflight
On a day in which Nancy Pelosi became the first female Speaker of the US House of Representatives, the Guardian reminds us that there are still plenty of jobs that discriminate between the sexes, including “Physics professors: There is a grand total of 515 physics professors in the UK, and a mere 25 of them…
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Newly-minted PhD
Congratulations to my student, Anastasia Niarchou, on passing her PhD exam, for her thesis, “Low Power in the CMB and its Implications for the Topology of the Universe” — the same work that was covered last week in New Scientist. Great work, Dr. Niarchou!
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The Rt. Hon. Tony Blair, MP
I somehow scored an invitation to a talk by the Prime Minister sponsored by The Royal Society on “Our Nation’s Future”, specifically, on Science Policy. (Personally, I was pleased to see an extremely large contingent from Imperial present, including Dame Julia Higgins (Principal of our Faculty of Engineering, and Foreign Secretary [!] of the Royal…
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Whew…
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I’ve just finished my lectures for the course in Fourier Series and Fourier Transforms that I’ve been teaching. It was an intense, exhilarating and ultimately frustrating three-and-a-half week adventure –and I fear that it didn’t go very well. It’s tough material, probably the first stuff that these second-year students have seen in their undergraduate career…
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Teaching Experiences: Fourier at Imperial
Today I started teaching my first real lecture course (as pointed out in the comments, the link is only accessible within the Imperal network). I am teaching the second-year physics students mathematical techniques of Fourier Series and Fourier Transforms — this is the theorem that you can represent any function as a sum of so-called…
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Job Satisfaction
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Tom Lutz, “The Summer Next Time” – New York Times: On paper, the academic life looks great. As many as 15 weeks off in the summer, four in the winter, one in the spring, and then, usually, only three days a week on campus the rest of the time. Anybody who tells you this wasn’t…