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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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Sponsor me!
More special pleading: I’ll be running in the Cancer Research UK 10K at Blenheim Palace on 1 October. If you’d like to do a little good (and encourage me), please feel free to donate a few of your dollars, pounds, euros, etc., to the cause, at my sponsorship page.
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Gender Bias by the Supposedly Rational
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The National Academies, America’s “honorific society of distinguished scholars” (the equivalent of the UK’s Royal Society) has just published a report, “Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering” (but it will cost you if you want to read the whole thing). The New York Times paraphrases the report:…
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Matter, Dark and Otherwise
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Anyone reading this blog has doubtless heard about the results announced a few weeks ago, observations of the “bullet cluster” claimed (in the title of the paper) to be “A direct empirical proof of the existence of dark matter.” (The basic idea is recounted better, and with prettier pictures, than I can do here by…
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Political Commandments
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Ronald Reagan often talked about the Eleventh Commandment: “Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican” (attributed to California Republican party chairman Gaylord Parkinson during the 1964 California Gubernatorial election). It certainly served Reagan well (for ill rather than good, despite his bizarre posthumous revalorization). The Labour Party could learn a thing or two.…