Science
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Teaching Cosmology
I’ve just finished teaching my eleven-week winter-term Cosmology course at Imperial. Like all lecturing, it was exhilerating, and exhausting. And like usual, I am somewhat embarrassed to say that I think I understand the subject better than when I started out. (I hope that the students can say some of the same things. Comments from…
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Margaret Burbidge
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(This is another Ada Lovelace day post. Ada Lovelace Day was started and organized by Suw Charman-Anderson. Even Sarah Brown, wife of UK PM Gordon Brown, has blogged and tweeted about it.) I was going to blog about the physicist Emmy Noether, but then I realized that someone beat me to it — last year.…
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Debating UK Science, Live and on the Net
Many different strands of the discussion of the UK science budget are coming together, starting with last week’s announcement of STFC‘s restructuring. This week the Royal Society released its report, “The Scientific Century: securing our future prosperity“, arguing that this is a crucial time to emphasize and invest in science, rather than pull away from…
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Some — not enough? — help for the STFC
The latest act in the black comedy which is the running of the Science and Technology Funding Council is being played out. The Science Minister, Lord Drayson (which sounds, with “science”, “minister” and “lord” all in one title, to my US ears more like a character from bad science fiction than an actual member of…
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Beyond Entropy II
I’ve been in Geneva now for a couple of days. We spent yesterday visiting CERN, trying to inspire the artists, architects and scientists alike (I’ve collaborated with people here, but I’ve never visited before). A mockup of a section of the CERN tunnels. More pictures here. You can also check out Peter Coles’ blog for…
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Beyond Entropy
I’m in Geneva for a few days as part of a project called “Beyond Entropy: When Entropy Becomes Form“, sponsored by the Architectural Association back in London, the brainchild of Stefano Rabolli Pansera and others at the AA. It brings together eight trios of architects, artists and scientists to produce works to be shown at…
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Climate Change: Who Should I Believe?
Today I went to a talk by Chris Rapley, a Professor at UCL and currently director of the Science Museum in London (across the quad from Imperial), “Climate Change: Who Should I Believe?”. In a department full of academic scientists (including a few working on the climate, such as our head of department, Professor Jo…
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Andrew Lange, Huan Tran
The cosmology community has had a terrible few months. I am saddened to report the passing of Andrew Lange, a physicist from CalTech and one of the world’s preeminent experimental cosmologists. Among many other accomplishments, Andrew was one of the leaders of the Boomerang experiment, which made the first large-scale map of the Cosmic Microwave…
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Bayes and Blake at Bunhill
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One of my holiday treks this year was across town to visit Bunhill Fields, final resting place of two of my favorite Londoners: William Blake and Thomas Bayes. Blake is of course one of the most famous poets in the English language, but most people know him only from short poems like The Tiger [sic]…
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Doctors, Deep Fields and Dark Matter
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Luckily, not all the astrophysics news this week was so bad. First, and most important, two of our Imperial College Astrophysics postgraduate students, Stuart Sale and Paniez Paykari, passed their PhD viva exams, and so are on their ways to officially being Doctors of Philosophy. Congratulations to both, especially (if I may say so) to…
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