inflation
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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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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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More from the Spherical Cows
In a very different way of translating scientific ideas into other forms and media, my friend, colleague and collaborator Lloyd Knox is back with a new series of short video documentaries under the auspices of his Spherical Cow Company. After a hiatus of a few months, they set themselves a challenge of producing three videos…
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Another launch
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Not all CMB (Cosmic Microwave Background) experiments get launched on a rocket. There’s a long history of telescopes flown from balloons — huge mylar balloons floating over 100,000 feet in the air. MAXIMA and BOOMERaNG, the first experiments to map out the microwave sky on the sub-degree scales containing information about the detailed physical conditions…
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Exam nightmares
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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