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Tying Myself in Knots
I’ll be appearing this Thursday, September 3, at the newly-reopened Whitechapel Gallery‘s Study Studio as part of “Knot Night“, hosted by sculptor Richard Wentworth. Richard has produced a box (or vitrine, if you want to be all art-world about it) called “A Confiscation of String” for the Gallery, and so a few of us have…
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Blogging Anniversary, and Other Celebrations
I was sitting in the lecture theatre of the Royal Institution at the Science Online London meeting (of which I hope to write more later, but you can retroactively follow the day’s tweets or just search for the day’s tags) when I realized I had missed the fifth anniversary of this blog this past July.…
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Elvis blues
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Today is the thirty-second anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death. It was recently brought to my attention that I am now older than he was on that day. But rather than sit in the bathroom and eat cheeseburgers, I’ll just leave you with this: I was thinking that night about Elvis Day that he died, day…
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Healthcare for profit and for good
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OK, if you are bored with my occasional forays into politics or religion, I apologize for this post on a subject about which I know even less. I was preparing a long post on my expatriate view of the US healthcare system versus the UK NHS (and I’ve even had a few years under the…
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Astronomical Objects, Near and Far
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The Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) is the “deepest” optical observation of the Universe: eleven days of Hubble Space Telescope observations concentrated on a tiny patch of sky. I recently came across this three-dimensional mockup of the HUDF, using our measurements of the redshifts (related to the distances) of each of the galaxies in the…
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On the Dark Side?
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A few weeks ago, I took part in a “Big Questions” debate with Subir Sarkar, a colleague from Oxford, on Dark Energy and the Fate of the Universe. For those of you who couldn’t attend, a related podcast is available, you can download my meagre slides, and it’s been mentioned on Physics World, as well…
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Hanging together? — The future of the CMB in the UK
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[Warning: this post will be fairly technical and political and may only be of interest to those in the field.] I spent the first couple of days this week stuck in a room in Cambridge with about 40 of my colleagues pondering a very important question: what is the future of the study of the…
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Cutting Advanced Fellowships in the UK
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Right now, the UK’s astronomy and nuclear/particle physics research council, STFC, is supposedly undergoing a series of “consultations” with the community to try to figure out exactly which of the many possible big-ticket items (telescopes, satellites, particle detectors, etc.) the community wants to pursue. In the meantime, however, things are proceeding in their usual autocratic…
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Big Questions — The Fate of the Universe
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As part of Imperial College Astrophysics’ ongoing series “The Big Questions”, I’ll be in discussion with Subir Sarkar of Oxford here at Imperial on Tuesday, 21 July 2009. We’ll be debating the fate of the Universe, and, more specifically, the existence or otherwise of Dark Energy, which appears to be causing the Universe to accelerate…
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Going Underground
In further London-based excitement, I was forced into something that most Londoners never get the chance to do: walking in a Tube tunnel. I was taking the Picadilly Line train down to Kings Cross, and, just after leaving the Caledonian Road station, the lights in the car dimmed and the train stopped — nothing particularly…