cosmology
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The Size of Planets, the Age of the Universe, the Ignorance of the Masses
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[This post is a bit long and diffuse… I may hack it up into bite-sized pieces later…] Just because my job has ‘astro’ in the title, doesn’t mean I know enough to comment on whether or not Pluto is a planet. And there’s plenty of other science-in-the-news… The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has decided that…
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Non-Gaussianity in Cosmology (on the Adriatic)
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I’m spending the week at the Workshop on Nongaussianity in Cosmology at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, just outside of Trieste, Italy. Just so you know I’m working hard, here’s the view from my room at the Adriatico Guest House that the ICTP runs: (More pictures here.) When I’ve got more time,…
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The size of the Universe
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I’m quoted today in article in New Scientist, “Universe Weighs in Surprisingly Light”. I spoke to the author, Zeeya Merali, last week about a recent article by Hans Fahr and Martin Heyl, in which they define a “radius of the universe” and therefore the amount of mass inside that radius. Because their calculation is done…
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Marx: Science and Paradox
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It is … paradox that the earth moves round the sun, and that water consists of two highly inflammable gases. Scientific truth is always paradox, if judged by everyday experience, which catches only the delusive nature of things. –Karl Marx, Das Kapital, quoted by Francis Wheen in The Guardian. Or that objects in motion tend…
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Cosmology in the Mediterranean
Like fellow-blogger Mark Trodden , I’ve just spent the week at scientific meetings in Ischia, an island off the coast of Naples. The first half of the week was for the yearly consortium meeting of the Planck Surveyor satellite. Although still endangered by further delays, we expect the satellite to be launched in early or…
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WMAP
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As promised, the team behind the WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) satellite have released their lovely new results. WMAP measures fluctuations in the CMB (which I’ve already written about a lot), and in 2003 they released high-resolution, high-sensitivity maps of the CMB over the whole sky. Today, they updated those maps, and also released new…
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Quote of the day (experts only)
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The ΛCDM Model requires two pieces of unknown physics. One is ‘Λ’ and the other is ‘CDM’ -Tom Shanks, at “Open Questions in Cosmology“, a meeting being held at the Max-Planck-Institut für Astrophysik in Garching, Germany. I’ll explain later.
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Boomerang
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A couple of weeks ago, my colleagues in the Boomerang Collaboration, spread out over the US, Italy, Canada, France and the UK, released five papers analyzing the data from the latest flight of the Boomerang instrument, over Antarctica in January 2003 (check this out for information from my fellow Boomerangers on what it’s like down…
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