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Launch blog — day 1
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Cross-posted from Andrew Jaffe’s Blog and the Planck Mission Blog Today was spent in Cayenne — the capital of French Guiana, where most of the hotels are located, and Kourou — home of ESA’a Centre Spatial Guianaise. We climbed up a nearby peak for a look over the Spaceport, but mostly we saw hand-sized spiders…
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Pre-launch blitz
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With less than a week to go before its planned launch, The Planck Surveyor Satellite has been loaded into the fairing of its Ariane 5 rocket along with its sister satellite, Herschel. It is scheduled to be rolled out to the pad on May 13, and the launch window opens on May 14 at 13:12…
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Musical Youth
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Sonic Youth on “Later with Jools Holland” reminds me of a US TV appearance by the band around 20 years ago, on a show called “Night Music” co-hosted by, in fact, Jools Holland and sax player David Sanborn. Sanborn’s solo recording career has largely (and not incorrectly) been tarred with “smooth jazz” brush; his broader…
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Planck Plonk
One of the perks of the project. (Don’t worry, not paid for by your tax dollars.)
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Bad Editing
The Astrophysical Journal has recently shifted publishers from the University of Chicago Press to the Institute of Physics. There seems to have been very little fuss in the process, but I was amused to notice this Erratum for the article “A Search for Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropies on Arcminute Scales With Bolocam”: As a result…
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Dyson disturbs
In school, Freeman Dyson became one of my heroes when I read his first memoir, Disturbing the Universe. It was an incredibly honor to meet him when he came to speak at my school — one of the advantages to growing up in New Jersey. He wrote and talked movingly of war, peace, science, books,…
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In the Beginning
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Last week, I participated in the Dana Centre‘s Big Ideas series, an evening called “In the Beginning“. Former Imperial postgrad Kate Land and I gave the standard cosmology spiel, philosopher of science Roman Frigg took his remit to discuss science and religion very seriously, and Chris Lintott acted as master of ceremonies (and took charge…
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Blogrolling
Thanks to The Telegraph‘s digital chief, Ian Douglas, for his pointer to me as one of “Five Great Physics Blogs“. Despite its usually, erm, detestable politics, The Telegraph has usually had excellent science and technology coverage, and I’m happy to be picked in such good company: the four other blogs are Peter Coles’ In the…
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Ada Lovelace Day — Henrietta Leavitt
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Today is Ada Lovelace Day, “an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.” I — along with more than a thousand other people — have pledged to write about a female role model in technology. Ada Lovelace was Byron’s daughter and worked with computer pioneer Charles Babbage on his “Computing…
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The Measurement Problem
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OK, this is going to be a very long post. About something I don’t pretend to be expert in. But it is science, at least. A couple of weeks ago, Radio 4’s highbrow “In Our Time” tackled the so-called “Measurement Problem”. That is: quantum mechanics predicts probabilities, not definite outcomes. And yet we see a…