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Outstanding questions for the standard cosmological model
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This week is the big “Outstanding questions for the standard cosmological model” meeting here at Imperial. I am too busy finishing up my topology talk to blog about it (and recovering from running 13.1 miles yesterday), but luckily Tommaso Dorigo has been on the ball (and has also taken some good photos which I’m sure…
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Cosmology, Philosophy and Topology in Edinburgh
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I’m just back from a couple of days up in Edinburgh, one of my favorite cities in the UK. London is bigger, more intense, but Edinburgh is more beautiful, dominated by its landscape–London is New York to Edinburgh’s San Francisco. I was up there to give the Edinburgh University Physics “General Interest Seminar”. Mostly, I…
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Neofelis diardi (Bornean)
Because you can never go wrong with a cat picture, especially of a new species: Borneo’s Clouded Leopard: © WWF-Canon / Alain COMPOST The world remains full of wonders…
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All the news that’s fit to print?
Steinn Sigurðsson points out that the New York Times‘ ridiculous pay-only access to its op-ed content is now free to University students and faculty. Despite claims by Brits to the contrary (and despite a series of newsgathering mishaps over the last few years), the NY Times remains the newspaper of record even outside of the…
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Big Smoke Science
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In his comment on last week’s post, fellow physicist blogger Tommaso lets me know that he’ll be attending a meeting that we’re hosting here at Imperial College next week, Outstanding questions for the standard cosmological model. We’ll be casting a critical eye over current cosmological models and data, but I expect most of us will…
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Raiding the science coffers
In the last couple of weeks, the UK Government has announced that the Department of Trade and Industry is so far in the red that it has cut £68 million from the science budget. Usually, government finance isn’t a zero-sum game. But this year, to pay for payouts having to do with the collapse of…
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New York state of music
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“We single-handedly lowered the standards of an entire industry” — David Johannsen of the New York Dolls, in “Once Upon a Time in New York” on BBC4 During the 1970s, while New York City was in economic and cultural meltdown, the disaffected and disenfranchised minorities of the city spawned punk, disco and hip-hop. Within a…
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Logical Proof, Scientific Proof, Religious “Proof”
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With yesterday’s article on “Faith” (vs Science) in the Guardian, and today’s London debate between bioligist Lewis Wolpert and the pseudorational William Lane Craig (previewed on the BBC’s Today show this morning), the UK seems to be the hotbed of tension between science and religion. I’ll leave it to the experts for a fuller exposition,…
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Another reason we should teach evolution and the big bang
…they are part of an an ancient Jewish conspiracy, and so it pisses off the anti-semites…
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