Science
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Cuts
I presume that anyone reading this blog knows that today is the day when the great unwashed masses of UK Astronomers heard about our financial fate from the STFC, the small arm of the UK government responsible for Astrophysics, Particle Physics and Nuclear Physics. For various reasons, some clear and others manifestly not, STFC is…
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Physics vs Poetry
When I’m traveling I try to read the New Yorker — a transatlantic flight usually gets me through most of an issue. I was even more interested than usual when I picked up the issue at Heathrow and found the front-cover blurb, “Physics vs Poetry: New fiction by Ian McEwan”. McEwan is thought of as…
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Bayesian Methods in Cosmology
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The perfect stocking-stuffer for that would-be Bayesian cosmologist you’ve been shopping for: As readers here will know, the Bayesian view of probability is just that probabilities are statements about our knowledge of the world, and thus eminently suited to use in scientific inquiry (indeed, this is really the only consistent way to make probabilistic statements…
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Obligatory post on climate change
The Institute of Physics is weighing in on the issue of climate change, so I thought I would take the opportunity to try to dumb things down as much as possible. The basic science behind climate change is well-understood: The mean temperature is increasing, with significant variation superposed from place to place and year to…
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Lev Kofman
I was saddened to hear this morning that Lev Kofman, a friend and fellow-cosmologist, died yesterday. Lev has been at CITA in Toronto for a decade, and has had a huge impact on the field, scientifically and personally. He will be missed. He is already. I’m sure there will be more remembrances to come, but…
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Big Questions: Spaceflight
In one of my earliest memories, I’m about four years old, at nursery school, sitting on the floor looking up at what must have been a small black and white television sitting on a table. The teachers were all terribly excited, and we little kids were always happy to watch television. But this wasn’t Sesame…
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On not being able to talk about science
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This week I was in the truly wonderful city of Bologna, home of possibly the oldest university in Europe. Nowadays, Bologna is also the home of IASF-BO, the Italian Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale e Fisica Cosmica, and was hosting this year’s Planck Satellite Consortium meeting. Of course I can’t talk about anything that was actually…
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Festschrift: Turner in Chicago
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Since Barcelona, I’ve also travelled to Chicago to attend a meeting in honor of the 60th birthday of Michael Turner, Professor at the University of Chicago, and a former head of the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate of the US National Science Foundation. Mike was one of my Ph.D. Supervisors, along with Josh Frieman, and…
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Planck’s First Light
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I’m happy to be able to point to ESA’s first post-launch press release from the Planck Surveyor Satellite. Here is a picture of the area of sky that Planck has observed during its “First Light Survey”, superposed on an optical image of the Milky Way galaxy: (Image credit: ESA, LFI and HFI Consortia (Planck); Background…
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The Universe is a Beautiful Place
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Or at least it’s very pretty. These are new pictures from the refurbished Hubble Space Telescope: NGC 6302 is a “planetary nebula”, material ejected from an aging star in our Milky Way galaxy; Omega Centauri is a globular cluster, a dense agglomeration of stars on the outskirts of the galaxy; the Carina Nebula is the…
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