dark energy

  • Science as metaphor

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    In further pop-culture crossover news, I was pleased to see this paragraph in John Keane’s review of Alan Ryan’s “On Politics” in this weekend’s Financial Times: Ryan sees this period [the 1940s] as the point of triumph of liberal democracy against its Fascist and Stalinist opponents. Closer attention shows this decade was instead a moment…

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  • Fundamental Scalar found?

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    I am just back from STFC‘s media event covering what did, in the end, turn out to be the discovery of a particle that appears to be the long-predicted Higgs boson, the last component in the Standard Model of Particle Physics to be discovered, and in many ways its linchpin. Via a mechanism known as…

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  • A Big Day for Dark Energy

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    For the second time this decade, the Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded for cosmology, to Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess and Brian Schmidt. They are among the leaders of the teams that used the properties of supernovae — exploding stars — to measure the rate of expansion of the Universe over time. In so…

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  • Copenhagen

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    Like my friend and colleague Peter Coles, I am just returned from the fine wine-soaked dinner for the workshop “Cosmology and Astroparticle physics from the LHC to PLANCK” held at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. It is an honor to visit the place where so many discoveries of 20th Century physics were made, and…

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  • On the Dark Side?

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    A few weeks ago, I took part in a “Big Questions” debate with Subir Sarkar, a colleague from Oxford, on Dark Energy and the Fate of the Universe. For those of you who couldn’t attend, a related podcast is available, you can download my meagre slides, and it’s been mentioned on Physics World, as well…

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  • Big Questions — The Fate of the Universe

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    As part of Imperial College Astrophysics’ ongoing series “The Big Questions”, I’ll be in discussion with Subir Sarkar of Oxford here at Imperial on Tuesday, 21 July 2009. We’ll be debating the fate of the Universe, and, more specifically, the existence or otherwise of Dark Energy, which appears to be causing the Universe to accelerate…

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  • Exam nightmares

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    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…

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  • Cash for cosmology

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    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…

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