The Random Universe

cosmological constant

  • Exam nightmares

    ,

    defjaf

    ·

    The students in my cosmology course had their exam last week. There’s no doubt that they found the course tough this year — it was my first time teaching it, and I departed pretty significantly from the previous syllabus. Classically, cosmology was the study of the overall “world model” — the few parameters that describe…

    Read More

  • Gruber Prize 2007

    defjaf

    ·

    This year’s Gruber Prize in Cosmology has been awarded to the two teams that used distant supernovae — exploding stars that are nearly “standard candles” — to be the first to conclusively determine that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating, likely due to something very much like Einstein’s “Cosmological Constant”. (Or, at least, among…

    Read More

  • Cash for cosmology

    defjaf

    ·

    Congratulations to my colleagues Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess and Brian Schmidt! They are sharing the rather lucrative Shaw Prize for their leadership in the late 1990s discovery that the Universe seems to be accelerating in its expansion. In particular, through painstaking observational campaigns over many years, they observed that distant supernovae — exploding stars whose…

    Read More

Search

Recent Posts

Categories

Archive