Science
-
Oscillators, Integrals, and Bugs
[Update: The bug seems fixed in the latest version, 10.0.2.] I am in my third year teaching a course in Quantum Mechanics, and we spend a lot of time working with a very simple system known as the harmonic oscillator — the physics of a pendulum, or a spring. In fact, the simple harmonic oscillator…
-
Loncon 3
Briefly (but not brief enough for a single tweet): I’ll be speaking at Loncon 3, the 72nd World Science Fiction Convention, this weekend (doesn’t that website have a 90s retro feel?). At 1:30 on Saturday afternoon, I’ll be part of a panel trying to answer the question “What Is Science?” As Justice Potter Stewart once…
-
More events: me and my friends
·
A quick heads-up on some recent and upcoming events: A couple of weeks ago, I delivered my long-delayed (if not actually long-awaited) inaugural lecture, “The Random Universe“. A video is currently available through Imperial College’s media library so you can hear me opine on how we learn about the history and evolution of the Universe…
-
Spring & Summer Science
·
As the academic year winds to a close, scientists’ thoughts turn towards all of the warm-weather travel ahead (in order to avoid thinking about exam marking). Mostly, that means attending scientific conferences, like the upcoming IAU Symposium, Statistical Challenges in 21st Century Cosmology in Lisbon next month, and (for me and my collaborators) the usual…
-
Gravitational Waves?
·
[Uh oh, this is sort of disastrously long, practically unedited, and a mixture of tutorial- and expert-level text. Good luck. Send corrections.] It’s been almost exactly a year since the release of the first Planck cosmology results (which I discussed in some depth at the time). On this auspicious anniversary, we in the cosmology community…
-
Observing, days 3-4: galaxies and blank fields
·
After a couple of days of lousy weather, the sky cleared up and dried out Wednesday. Eventually, we got down to τ<0.08 — not quite the best possible conditions, but good enough for almost anything we might want to do. We started out slightly worse than that, but that meant we got to observe more…
-
Observing, days 1-2
·
I am sitting in the control room of the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT), 14,000 feet up Mauna Kea, on Hawaii’s Big Island. I’m here to do observations for the SCUBA-2 Cosmology Legacy Survey (CLS). I’m not really an observer — this is really my first time at a full-sized, modern telescope. But much of…
-
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…
-
The next generation of large satellites: PRISM and/or eLISA?
·
Today was the deadline for submitting so-called “White Papers” proposing the next generation of the European Space Agency satellite missions. Because of the long lead times for these sorts of complicated technical achievements, this call is for launches in the faraway years of 2028 or 2034. (These dates would be harder to wrap my head…
-
Planck 2013: the PR
Yesterday’s release of the Planck papers and data wasn’t just aimed at the scientific community, of course. We wanted to let the rest of the world know about our results. The main press conference was at ESA HQ in Paris, and there was a smaller event here in London run by the UKSA, which I…
Search
Recent Posts
Categories
- Academia (64)
- Art (57)
- Blog (1)
- Miscellanea (102)
- Music (71)
- Net (63)
- News (28)
- Politics (110)
- Science (333)
- Uncategorized (4)