Science
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Steve Rawlings
The astronomy community in the UK and beyond suffered a terrible blow last week with the passing of Steve Rawlings, Professor of Astrophysics at Oxford. I spent quite a lot of time in Oxford a few years ago, and was lucky to get to know Steve a bit. He had spent the last several years…
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Me, the BBC, and Stephen Hawking
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I made it back onto the BBC today, this time to discuss Stephen Hawking on his 70th birthday (most of the people more qualified than me are actually at a meeting in his honour in Cambridge). (Actually, my very first appearance on the BBC, which generated one of my very first blog posts, was to…
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The Controversy about Hypothesis Testing
I spent a quick couple of days last week at the The Controversy about Hypothesis Testing meeting in Madrid. The topic of the meeting was indeed the question of “hypothesis testing“, which I addressed in a post a few months ago: how do you choose between conflicting interpretations of data? The canonical version of this…
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Bluffing about Mars
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Saturday afternoon I received a call from a news producer at the BBC — could I come talk about the Mars Science Laboratory, launched earlier that day? This was a tough question, publicity-monger though I am: I don’t actually know anything about Mars. I suppose to people outside of the very broad field of “astronomy”,…
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Urban Sputnik, Live at Imperial
Urban Sputnik, our collaboration with Vanessa Harden and Dominic Southgate of Gammaroot Design is currently on display at Imperial College in the main entrance of the Norman Foster-designed business school, located on Exhibition Road in London, just up the street from the Science Museum, the V&A Museum and the Natural History Museum. I’ve discussed the…
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A Big Day for Dark Energy
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For the second time this decade, the Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded for cosmology, to Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess and Brian Schmidt. They are among the leaders of the teams that used the properties of supernovae — exploding stars — to measure the rate of expansion of the Universe over time. In so…
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Passion for Light
It’s been a busy few weeks, and that seems like a good excuse for my lack of posts. Since coming back from Scotland, I’ve been to: Paris, for our bi-monthly Planck Core Team meetings, discussing of the state of the data from the satellite, and of our ongoing processing of it; Cambridge, for yet more…
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STFC and UKSA
Funding for space missions in the UK was split from the Science and Technology Facilities Council to the the UK Space Agency earlier this year. Very roughly, UKSA will fund the missions themselves all the way through to the processing of data, while STFC will fund the science that comes from analysing the data. To…
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One chance in 3.5 million
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Yes, more on statistics. In a recent NY Times article, science reporter Dennis Overbye discusses recent talks from Fermilab and CERN scientists which may hint at the discovery of the much-anticipated Higgs Boson. The executive summary is: it hasn’t been found yet. But in the course of the article, Overbye points out that To qualify…
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Astrophysics, Clocks and Fundamental Constants
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I spent last week at the Physizkentrum Bad Honnef on the Rhine, near Cologne, at conference with the name and wide-ranging remit “Astrophysics, Clocks and Fundamental Constants“. We were all there to talk about the ideas and technologies that relate those disparate fields: Can we measure what we think of as the fundamental constants of…
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