Science
-
Kelvin’s Desk
·
I spent a few days this week up in Glasgow (I am beginning to realize I prefer Scottish cities to English ones, except for London itself), helping evaluate the work being done up there as well as in Cardiff and Strathclyde to search for gravitational radiation using experiments like LIGO (in the US) and GEO…
-
Chicago cosmology ’casts
·
I haven’t had a chance to listen yet, but “Slacker Astronomy” is featuring a series of podcast interviews with cosmologists from the Kavli Center at the University of Chicago, where I got my PhD. There are interviews with my de facto PhD supervisor, Josh Frieman, my de jure supervisor (long story) Mike Turner, and even…
-
LA’s Burning
·
A beautiful but frightening picture of the fire burning near the Griffith Park Observatory in Los Angeles. Evidence that we were probably never meant to live in that part of the world? (Photo courtesy Monica Almeida/New York Times)
-
Placeholder
·
I realize that I haven’t posted in nearly two weeks. Between marking exams, gardening, attempting to solve differential equations and calculate integrals with several hundred terms, inspiration has been lacking. Here are some things I may yet get to: The book launch for Universe or Multiverse, edited by QMW Cosmologist Bernard Carr. Entertaining, for sure,…
-
Art, Science, Neutrinos
Andreas Gursky, arguably the most famous contemporary photographer (and inarguably the most well-remunerated one, after a recent $3 million sale) has a new show at London’s White Cube Mason’s Yard Gallery. Gursky creates large-scale pictures of various aspects of modern life — apartment buildings, agriculture, shopping. He digitally manipulates and combines individual photos to give…
-
Opening the box
·
This post is a work in progress, but I’ve decided to post it in its unfinished state. Comments and questions welcome! This week I went to a seminar on the new results from the MiniBooNE experiment given here at Imperial by Morgan Wascko. The MiniBooNE results have been discussed in depth elsewhere. Like MINOS last…
-
Proof
·
If you’ve been intrigued (but possibly unconvinced) by my recent arguments about induction and the nature of scientific proof, go read Sean Carroll’s riff on the distinction between belief and proof in science. When we’re discussing the existence of quarks (or superstings), this may seem a literally academic argument, but these distinctions surface in ongoing…
-
Things I’m not going to blog about
The blogosphere is in echo-chamber mode with advice and admonition for how bloggers should behave (don’t be rude), and how scientists should spread the rational word (don’t be boring).
-
April First (and Second)
We take so much of the web for granted today, we often forget how very contingent it all is. Without the very specific work by Tim Berners-Lee inventing the http protocol, perhaps some sort of hypertext communication standard would have come along, but it’s hard to believe that it would be quite the same. Berners-Lee…
-
Nature Network London, still-Outstanding Questions, and new Satellites
Yesterday evening I attended the launch party for Nature Network London, a new site run by Nature magazine, which hopes to be a web home for science and scientists in London. There are articles, blogs, discussion forums and calendars of scientific events. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I ended up meeting lots of people from Imperial — whom…
Search
Recent Posts
Categories
- Academia (64)
- Art (57)
- Blog (1)
- Miscellanea (103)
- Music (71)
- Net (63)
- News (28)
- Politics (110)
- Science (333)
- Uncategorized (4)