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Whew…
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I’ve just finished my lectures for the course in Fourier Series and Fourier Transforms that I’ve been teaching. It was an intense, exhilarating and ultimately frustrating three-and-a-half week adventure –and I fear that it didn’t go very well. It’s tough material, probably the first stuff that these second-year students have seen in their undergraduate career…
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Garden State
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It’s not every day I get to blog the praises of my home state, but New Jersey’s Supreme Court has said that same-sex couples are entitled to “the same rights and benefits enjoyed by opposite-sex couples under the civil marriage statutes”, but fall short of calling such unions “marriage”. Because of that last caveat, The…
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African Science
This past week I had the honor of meeting members of various African National Science Academies visiting the UK on the invitation of the Britain’s Royal Society. I was invited to talk about my experiences in the Society’s own MP-Scientist Pairing “Scheme” that I participated in last year. These are high-powered scientists, holding posts in…
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Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll!
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Chuck Berry turns 80 next week! He invented rock ‘n’ roll and he understands the intimate relationship between electric guitars and capitalism as well as Colonel Tom Parker ever did — and much better than Elvis.
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Finish line
Here is my spectacular finish at last weekend’s CRUK Blenheim Palace 10k run. In the endorphin-fueled rush following, my running-mates and I decided that our next goal will be the Bath Half Marathon. It’s only twice as long (twice as long as 10km, and about twice as long as any of us have ever run…
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Teaching Experiences: Fourier at Imperial
Today I started teaching my first real lecture course (as pointed out in the comments, the link is only accessible within the Imperal network). I am teaching the second-year physics students mathematical techniques of Fourier Series and Fourier Transforms — this is the theorem that you can represent any function as a sum of so-called…
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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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Hole in the Ground
Last year, musician, artist, polymath and all-around sweet guy Jem Finer built a radio telescope in the Parks in Oxford. This year, funded by an award from the PRS Foundation for New Music, he’s looking in the opposite direction: he’s dug a well in the King’s Wood, in Kent (Southeast England) and made it into…
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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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