Science
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NASA’s Nobel: small, medium and big science
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The New York Times opines on the physics Nobel: …The award is richly deserved, and the agency deserves great credit for making the work possible. Too bad the program that yielded these pioneering discoveries was reined in not long ago so that NASA could pour billions of dollars into resuming shuttle flights, finishing the international…
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Nobel Prize 2006: The Cosmic Microwave Background
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News flash: John Mather and George Smoot, two of the scientists behind the COBE Satellite, have won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for their measurements of the average temperature of the CMB and the fluctuations about that average. (Here’s one self-aggrandizing reason why I find this particularly exciting.) The average, measured by the FIRAS…
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Fixes for Physics?
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Physics-watchers will have found it hard to miss the recent flood [?] of public criticisms of String Theory, the currently favored candidate for a ‘theory of everything’ unifying particle physics and gravity (and therefore providing a fundamental theory of cosmology). The two most prominent have been Peter Woit from Columbia, who has spun off his…
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Gender Bias by the Supposedly Rational
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The National Academies, America’s “honorific society of distinguished scholars” (the equivalent of the UK’s Royal Society) has just published a report, “Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering” (but it will cost you if you want to read the whole thing). The New York Times paraphrases the report:…
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Matter, Dark and Otherwise
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Anyone reading this blog has doubtless heard about the results announced a few weeks ago, observations of the “bullet cluster” claimed (in the title of the paper) to be “A direct empirical proof of the existence of dark matter.” (The basic idea is recounted better, and with prettier pictures, than I can do here by…
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More cosmology prizes
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The Balzan prize, worth 1,000,000 Swiss Francs, was just awarded to Andrew Lange and Paolo de Bernardis for their work as the original Principal Investigators of Boomerang, which, in 2000, produced the first high-resolution maps of the Cosmic Microwave Background and allowed a definitive measurement of the curvature of the Universe, in the sense of…
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Quick update
Sorry I’ve been silent… here’s a quick update: I’m in Pasadena, California, working at JPL and Caltech on various tasks related to the Planck Surveyor Cosmic Microwave Background satellite, to be launched in a couple of years (which means “soon” in this game). I’m sure you’re waiting breathlessly to hear my commentary on such crucial…
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The Size of Planets, the Age of the Universe, the Ignorance of the Masses
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[This post is a bit long and diffuse… I may hack it up into bite-sized pieces later…] Just because my job has ‘astro’ in the title, doesn’t mean I know enough to comment on whether or not Pluto is a planet. And there’s plenty of other science-in-the-news… The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has decided that…
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Foo
So apparently this weekend Google, Nature, and O’Reilly Media are hosting a ‘Science Foo Camp‘ at Google’s Silicon Valley HQ. O’Reilly has held a few tech-oriented Foo Camps over the last few years, and apparently the list of invitees has always provoked some debate — if you’re not invited, you’re either not important enough, or…
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Sinuous Titanium & Big Iron
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I’m recently back from my vacation in Bilbao. Aside from the usual “getting away from it all”, the first highlight was the amazing pintxos–Basque tapas like squid-and-ink croquettes and piles of jamon iberico. With a full tummy, I could handle Frank Gehry’s spectacular Guggenheim Bilbao, one of the most beautiful buildings in the world. Sheathed…
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