# The Random Universe

> by Andrew Jaffe


## Posts

- [The Only Gaijin in the Onsen](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2025/01/the-only-gaijin-in-the-onsen/): After living in Japan for about four months, we left in mid-December. We miss it already. One of the pleasures we discovered is the onsen, or hot spring. Originally referring to the natural volcanic springs themselves, and the villages around them, there are now onsens all over Japan. Many hotels have an onsen, and most towns will have several. Some people still use them as their primary bath and shower for keeping clean. (Outside of actual volcanic locations, these are technically sento rather than onsen.) You don’t actually wash yourself in the hot baths themselves; they are just for soaking, […]
- [Discovering Japan](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2024/12/discovering-japan/): My old friend Marc Weidenbaum, curator and writer of disquiet.com, reminded me, in his latest post, of the value of blogging. So, here I am (again). Since September, I have been on sabbatical in Japan, working mostly at QUP (International Center for Quantum-field Measurement Systems for Studies of the Universe and Particles) at the KEK accelerator lab in Tsukuba, Japan, and spending time as well at the Kavli IPMU, about halfway into Tokyo from here. Tsukuba is a “science city” about 30 miles northeast of Tokyo, home to multiple Japanese scientific establishments (such as a University and a major lab […]
- [It’s been a while](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2024/05/its-been-a-while/): If you’re reading this, then you might realise that I haven’t posted anything substantive here since 2018, commemorating the near-end of the Planck collaboration. In fact it took us well into the covid pandemic before the last of the official Planck papers were published, and further improved analyses of our data continues, alongside the use of the results as the closest thing we have to a standard cosmological model, despite ongoing worries about tensions between data from Planck and other measurements of the cosmological parameters. As the years have passed, it has felt more and more difficult to add to […]
- [The Milky Way](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2024/03/the-milky-way/)
- [Planck: Demographics and Diversity](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2018/08/planck_demograp/): Another aspect of Planck’s legacy bears examining. A couple of months ago, the 2018 Gruber Prize in Cosmology was awarded to the Planck Satellite. This was (I think) a well-deserved honour for all of us who have worked on Planck during the more than 20 years since its conception, for a mission which confirmed a standard model of cosmology and measured the parameters which describe it to accuracies of a few percent. Planck is the latest in a series of telescopes and satellites dating back to the COBE Satellite in the early 90s, through the MAXIMA and Boomerang balloons (among […]
- [(Almost) The end of Planck](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2018/07/almost_the_end/): This week, we released (most of) the final set of papers from the Planck collaboration — the long-awaited Planck 2018 results (which were originally meant to be the “Planck 2016 results”, but everything takes longer than you hope…), available on the ESA website as well as the arXiv. More importantly for many astrophysicists and cosmologists, the final public release of Planck data is also available. Anyway, we aren’t quite finished: those of you up on your roman numerals will notice that there are only 9 papers but the last one is “XII” — the rest of the papers will come […]
- [Leon Lucy, R.I.P.](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2018/05/leon_lucy_rip/): I have the unfortunate duty of using this blog to announce the death a couple of weeks ago of Professor Leon B Lucy, who had been a Visiting Professor working here at Imperial College from 1998. Leon got his PhD in the early 1960s at the University of Manchester, and after postdoctoral positions in Europe and the US, worked at Columbia University and the European Southern Observatory over the years, before coming to Imperial. He made significant contributions to the study of the evolution of stars, understanding in particular how they lose mass over the course of their evolution, and […]
- [WMAP Breaks Through](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2017/12/wmap_breaks_thr/): It was announced this morning that the WMAP team has won the $3 million Breakthrough Prize. Unlike the Nobel Prize, which infamously is only awarded to three people each year, the Breakthrough Prize was awarded to the whole 27-member WMAP team, led by Chuck Bennett, Gary Hinshaw, Norm Jarosik, Lyman Page, and David Spergel, but including everyone through postdocs and grad students who worked on the project. This is great, and I am happy to send my hearty congratulations to all of them (many of whom I know well and am lucky to count as friends). I actually knew about […]
- [The Chandrasekhar Mass and the Hubble Constant](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2017/10/the_chandrasekh/): The first direct detection of gravitational waves was announced in February of 2015 by the LIGO team, after decades of planning, building and refining their beautiful experiment. Since that time, the US-based LIGO has been joined by the European Virgo gravitational wave telescope (and more are planned around the globe). The first four events that the teams announced were from the spiralling in and eventual mergers of pairs of black holes, with masses ranging from about seven to about forty times the mass of the sun. These masses are perhaps a bit higher than we expect to by typical, which […]
- [JSONfeed](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2017/05/jsonfeed/): More technical stuff, but I’m trying to re-train myself to actually write on this blog, so here goes… For no good reason other than it was easy, I have added a JSONfeed to this blog. It can be found at http://andrewjaffe.net/blog/feed.json, and accessed from the bottom of the right-hand sidebar if you’re actually reading this at andrewjaffe.net. What does this mean? JSONfeed is an idea for a sort-of successor to something called RSS, which may stand for really simple syndication, a format for encapsulating the contents of a blog like this one so it can be indexed, consumed, and read […]
- [Python Bug Hunting](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2017/05/python_bug_hunt/): This is a technical, nerdy post, mostly so I can find the information if I need it later, but possibly of interest to others using a Mac with the Python programming language, and also since I am looking for excuses to write more here. (See also updates below.) It seems that there is a bug in the latest (mid-May 2017) release of Apple’s macOS Sierra 10.12.5 (ok, there are plenty of bugs, as there in any sufficiently complex piece of software). It first manifested itself (to me) as an error when I tried to load the jupyter notebook, a web-based […]
- [Knightian Uncertainty](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2017/05/knightian_uncer/): [Update: I have fixed some broken links, and modified the discussion of QBism and the recent paper by Chris Fuchs— thanks to Chris himself for taking the time to read and find my mistakes!] For some reason, I’ve come across an idea called “Knightian Uncertainty” quite a bit lately. Frank Knight was an economist of the free-market conservative “Chicago School”, who considered various concepts related to probability in a book called Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit. He distinguished between “risk”, which he defined as applying to events to which we can assign a numerical probability, and “uncertainty”, to those events about […]
- [SOLE Survivor](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2017/01/sole_survivor_1/): I recently finished my last term lecturing our second-year Quantum Mechanics course, which I taught for five years. It’s a required class, a mathematical introduction to one of the most important set of ideas in all of physics, and really the basis for much of what we do, whether that’s astrophysics or particle physics or almost anything else. It’s a slightly “old-fashioned” course, although it covers the important basic ideas: the Schrödinger Equation, the postulates of quantum mechanics, angular momentum, and spin, leading almost up to what is needed to understand the crowning achievement of early quantum theory: the structure […]
- [Electoral woes and votes](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2016/11/electoral_woes/): Like everyone else in my bubble, I’ve been angrily obsessing about the outcome of the US Presidential election for the last two weeks. I’d like to say that I’ve been channelling that obsession into action, but so far I’ve mostly been reading and hoping (and being disappointed). And trying to parse all the “explanations” for Trump’s election. Mostly, it’s been about what the Democrats did wrong (imperfect Hillary, ignoring the white working class, not visiting Wisconsin, too much identity politics), and what the Republicans did right (imperfect Trump, dog whistles, focusing on economics and security). But there has been an […]
- [The Sick Rose](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2016/06/the_sick_rose/): O Rose thou art sick. The invisible worm, That flies in the night In the howling storm: Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy: And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy. —William Blake, Songs of Experience
- [Wussy (Best Band in America?)](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2016/05/wussy_best_band/): It’s been a year since the last entry here. So I could blog about the end of Planck, the first observation of gravitational waves, fatherhood, or the horror (comedy?) of the US Presidential election. Instead, it’s going to be rock ’n’ roll, though I don’t know if that’s because it’s too important, or not important enough. It started last year when I came across Christgau’s A+ review of Wussy’s Attica and the mentions of Sonic Youth, Nirvana and Television seemed compelling enough to make it worth a try (paid for before listening even in the streaming age). He was right. […]
- [Atheism, naturalism, and the way things ought to be](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2015/03/atheism_natural/): In an occasionally thoughtful but mostly silly attempted takedown of the so-called New Atheists (Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and such), philosopher John Gray writes that there is an irresolvable contradiction between viewing religion naturalistically — as a human adaptation to living in the world — and condemning it as a tissue of error and illusion. -John Gray, What Scares the New Atheists No, there’s not. There are lots of human adaptations that are useless or outmoded. Racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry have at least some naturalistic explanation in terms of evolution, but we certainly ought to condemn them despite […]
- [Oscillators, Integrals, and Bugs](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2014/11/oscillators_int/): [Update: The bug seems fixed in the latest version, 10.0.2.] I am in my third year teaching a course in Quantum Mechanics, and we spend a lot of time working with a very simple system known as the harmonic oscillator — the physics of a pendulum, or a spring. In fact, the simple harmonic oscillator (SHO) is ubiquitous in almost all of physics, because we can often represent the behaviour of some system as approximately the motion of an SHO, with some corrections that we can calculate using a technique called perturbation theory. It turns out that in order to […]
- [Loncon 3](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2014/08/loncon_3/): Briefly (but not brief enough for a single tweet): I’ll be speaking at Loncon 3, the 72nd World Science Fiction Convention, this weekend (doesn’t that website have a 90s retro feel?). At 1:30 on Saturday afternoon, I’ll be part of a panel trying to answer the question “What Is Science?” As Justice Potter Stewart once said in a somewhat more NSFW context, the best answer is probably “I know it when I see it” but we’ll see if we can do a little better than that tomorrow. My fellow panelists seem to be writers, curators, philosophers and theologians (one of […]
- [More events: me and my friends](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2014/06/more_events_me/): A quick heads-up on some recent and upcoming events: A couple of weeks ago, I delivered my long-delayed (if not actually long-awaited) inaugural lecture, “The Random Universe“. A video is currently available through Imperial College’s media library so you can hear me opine on how we learn about the history and evolution of the Universe (and my career thinking about those things). The squeamish may want to shut their eyes at about three minutes in to avoid a picture of me in a wetsuit…. On Tuesday, June 10, my friend and colleague Pedro Ferreira will be speaking at the London […]
- [Spring & Summer Science](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2014/04/spring_summer_s/): As the academic year winds to a close, scientists’ thoughts turn towards all of the warm-weather travel ahead (in order to avoid thinking about exam marking). Mostly, that means attending scientific conferences, like the upcoming IAU Symposium, Statistical Challenges in 21st Century Cosmology in Lisbon next month, and (for me and my collaborators) the usual series of meetings to prepare for the 2014 release of Planck data. But there are also opportunities for us to interact with people outside of our technical fields: public lectures and festivals. Next month, parallel to the famous Hay Festival of Literature & the Arts, […]
- [Gravitational Waves?](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2014/03/gravitational_w/): [Uh oh, this is sort of disastrously long, practically unedited, and a mixture of tutorial- and expert-level text. Good luck. Send corrections.] It’s been almost exactly a year since the release of the first Planck cosmology results (which I discussed in some depth at the time). On this auspicious anniversary, we in the cosmology community found ourselves with yet more tantalising results to ponder, this time from a ground-based telescope called BICEP2. While Planck’s results were measurements of the temperature of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), this year’s concerned its polarisation. Background Polarisation is essentially a headless arrow that can […]
- [Around Asia in search of a meal](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2014/03/around_asia_in/): I’m recently back from my mammoth trip through Asia (though in fact I’m up in Edinburgh as I write this, visiting as a fellow of the Higgs Centre For Theoretical Physics). I’ve already written a little about the middle week of my voyage, observing at the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, and I hope to get back to that soon — at least to post some pictures of and from Mauna Kea. But even more than telescopes, or mountains, or spectacular vistas, I seemed to have spent much of the trip thinking about and eating food. (Even at the telescope, food […]
- [Observing, days 3-4: galaxies and blank fields](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2014/02/observing_days_1/): After a couple of days of lousy weather, the sky cleared up and dried out Wednesday. Eventually, we got down to τ<0.08 — not quite the best possible conditions, but good enough for almost anything we might want to do. We started out slightly worse than that, but that meant we got to observe more interesting things: nearby bright, big galaxies. Unfortunately, a galaxy that is bright and big in visible light is still just a blob in the submillimetre (submm). Our first one was NGC 3034, aka M82, exciting for two reasons. First, it’s the prototypical starburst galaxy, a […]
- [Observing, days 1-2](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2014/02/observing_days/): I am sitting in the control room of the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT), 14,000 feet up Mauna Kea, on Hawaii’s Big Island. I’m here to do observations for the SCUBA-2 Cosmology Legacy Survey (CLS). I’m not really an observer — this is really my first time at a full-sized, modern telescope. But much of JCMT’s observing time is taken up with a series of so-called Legacy Surveys (JLS) — large projects, observing large amounts of sky or large numbers of stars or galaxies. JCMT is a submillimeter telescope: it detects light with wavelength at or just below one millimeter. […]
- [meTube](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2014/01/metube/): Some time last year, Physics World magazine asked some of us to record videos discussing scientific topics in 100 seconds. Among others, I made one on cosmic inflation and another on what scientists can gain from blogging, which for some reason has just been posted to YouTube, and then tweeted about by FQXi (without which I would have forgotten the whole thing). There are a few other videos of me, although it turns out that there are lots of people called “Andrew Jaffe” on YouTube. I’m posting this not (only) for the usual purposes of self-aggrandizement, but to force — […]
- [Academic Blogging Still Dangerous?](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2013/12/academic_bloggi/): Nearly a decade ago, blogging was young, and its place in the academic world wasn’t clear. Back in 2005, I wrote about an anonymous article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, a so-called “advice” column admonishing academic job seekers to avoid blogging, mostly because it let the hiring committee find out things that had nothing whatever to do with their academic job, and reject them on those (inappropriate) grounds. I thought things had changed. Many academics have blogs, and indeed many institutions encourage it (here at Imperial, there’s a College-wide list of blogs written by people at all levels, and […]
- [Teaching mistakes](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2013/10/teaching_mistak/): The academic year has begun, and I’m teaching our second-year Quantum Mechanics course again. I was pretty happy with last year’s version, and the students didn’t completely disagree. This year, there have been a few changes to the structure of the course — although not as much to the content as I might have liked (“if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, although I’d still love to use more of the elegant Dirac notation and perhaps discuss quantum information a bit more). We’ve moved some of the material to the first year, so the students should already come into the […]
- [Songs about f*&%ing](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2013/06/songs_about_fin/): First, my apologies that I couldn’t resist the almost not-safe-for-work title, especially to those expecting posts about astrophysics and cosmology rather than a reference to a 1987 record by Big Black (which it’s worth pointing out can be found in its entirety on YouTube). But this is not a post about Big Black. Rather, it’s a brief reminiscence of another album with a similar subject matter and a very different style, Liz Phair‘s Exile in Guyville, which I was shocked to discover is about to have its 20th anniversary, also commemorated with an article and interview in the Chicago Tribune. […]
- [The next generation of large satellites: PRISM and/or eLISA?](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2013/05/the_next_genera/): Today was the deadline for submitting so-called “White Papers” proposing the next generation of the European Space Agency satellite missions. Because of the long lead times for these sorts of complicated technical achievements, this call is for launches in the faraway years of 2028 or 2034. (These dates would be harder to wrap my head around if I weren’t writing this on the same weekend that I’m attending the 25th reunion of my university graduation, an event about which it’s difficult to avoid the clichéd thought that May, 1988 feels like the day before yesterday.) At least two of the […]
- [Reformat](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2013/04/reformat/): Another technical note: I’ve just reformatted the whole blog. Let me know if there are any problems (or if you just think it’s ugly).
- [Infrastructure problems](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2013/04/infrastructure/): Just a quick note that the blog has been having some issues with its infrastructure: pointers to individual entries seem to be broken. I’m on the case — apologies if you can’t get to anything you’re looking for. Update: fixed, I think. Let me know if there are any further problems. (The blog should be a bit faster, too, as I’ve moved over to statically publishing all the pages. Don’t worry if you don’t know what that means.)
- [TimeWave — Quest for the Grail: An International Adventure Game](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2013/04/timewave_quest/): About a year ago, I wrote about TimeWave a festival of art, science and technology coming this May to London, with tendrils snaking out to New York and LA. As part of the festival, we’re organising Quest for the Grail: An International Adventure Game, later this month: from noon to 5pm in London and right afterwards, noon to 5pm in Manhattan, New York. The London teams will “hunt for objects in Clerkenwell hotspots…from the Order of St. John to Blackfriars Bridge to the International Magic Shop. You may be looking for a charm against the Plague, a tombstone or a […]
- [Planck 2013: the PR](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2013/03/planck_2013_the_1/): Yesterday’s release of the Planck papers and data wasn’t just aimed at the scientific community, of course. We wanted to let the rest of the world know about our results. The main press conference was at ESA HQ in Paris, and there was a smaller event here in London run by the UKSA, which I participated in as part of a panel of eight Planck scientists. The reporters tried to keep us honest, asking us to keep simplifying our explanations so that they — and their readers — could understand them. We struggled with describing how our measurements of the […]
- [Planck 2013: the science](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2013/03/planck_2013_the/): If you’re the kind of person who reads this blog, then you won’t have missed yesterday’s announcement of the first Planck cosmology results. The most important is our picture of the cosmic microwave background itself: But it takes a lot of work to go from the data coming off the Planck satellite to this picture. First, we have to make nine different maps, one at each of the frequencies in which Planck observes, from 30 GHz (with a wavelength of 1 cm) up to 850 GHz (0.350 mm) — note that the colour scales here are the same: At low […]
- [Breaking the silence (updated)](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2013/03/breaking_the_si/): My apologies for being far too busy to post. I’ll be much louder in couple of weeks once we release the Planck data — on March 21. Until then, I have to shut up and follow the Planck rules. OK, back to editing. (I’ll try to update this post with any advance information as it becomes available.) Update (on timing, not content): the main Planck press conference will be held on the morning of 21 March at 10am CET at ESA HQ in Paris. There will be a simultaneous UK event (9am GMT) held at the Royal Astronomical Society in […]
- [Not-quite hacked](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2013/02/not_quite_hacke/): This week, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Twitter, along with several other news organizations, have all announced that they were attacked by (most likely) Chinese hackers. I am not quite happy to join their ranks: for the last few months, the traffic on this blog has been vastly dominated by attempts to get into the various back-end scripts that run this site, either by direct password hacks or just denial-of-service attacks. In fact, I only noticed it because the hackers exceeded my bandwidth allowance by a factor of a few (and costing me a few hundred […]
- [Quantum SOLE](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2013/01/quantum_sole/): A couple of weeks I received the Student On-Line Evaluation (SOLE) results for my Quantum Mechanics course. There were only two specific questions, rating each of the following from “Very Good” through “Poor” (there’s a “no response” off to the right, as well): The structure and delivery of the teaching sessions The content of this module The numerical results (at right) were pretty good. Note that 114 students — about half — responded. The rest of the results are free-form comments. With such a big class it’s very difficult to find a style of teaching that suits everyone. Hence, the […]
- [EBEX launched!](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2012/12/ebex_launched/): My colleagues, friends and collaborators on the EBEX project are in Antarctica this (Northern) winter preparing the telescope for launch. And today, they did it: EBEX Launch movie Just beautiful. (The video is from Asad Aboobaker, whose blog EBEX in Flight is documenting the mission from the field.) EBEX is a next-generation CMB telescope, with hundreds of detectors measuring temperature and polarisation, which we hope will allow us to see the effects of an early epoch of cosmic inflation through the background of gravitational radiation that it produces. But right now, we are just hoping that EBEX catches some good […]
- [Quantum debrief](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2012/12/quantum_debrief/): A week ago, I finished my first time teaching our second-year course in quantum mechanics. After a bit of a taster in the first year, the class concentrates on the famous Schrödinger equation, which describes the properties of a particle under the influence of an external force. The simplest version of the equation is just This relates the so-called wave function, ψ, to what we know about the external forces governing its motion, encoded in the Hamiltonian operator, Ĥ. The wave function gives the probability (technically, the probability amplitude) for getting a particular result for any measurement: its position, its […]
- [Science as metaphor](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2012/12/science_as_meta/): 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 of what physicists call dark energy: the universe of meaning of democracy underwent a dramatic expansion, in defiance of the cosmic gravity of contemporary events. The ideal of monitory democracy was born. Not a bad metaphor. Nice to see that the author, a professor of […]
- [SDSS 1416+13B](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2012/12/sdss_141613b/): It’s not that often that I can find a reason to write about both astrophysics and music — my obsessions, vocations and avocations — at the same time. But the recent release of Scott Walker‘s (certainly weird, possibly wonderful) new record Bish Bosch has given me just such an excuse: Track 4 is a 21-minute opus of sorts, entitled “SDSS1416+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)”. The title seems a random collection of letters, numbers and words, but that’s not what it is: SDSS1416+13B is the (very slightly mangled) identification of an object in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) catalog — […]
- [Prizes and Books, As Yet Unread and Unwritten](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2012/11/prizes_and_book/): Over the last couple of months, I’ve managed invites to a few swish literary shindigs. For no literary reason at all (I’m the proud godparent of someone who works for the prize’s sponsors), I was able to make my way into this year’s ceremony for the Man Booker Prize, held in the rather splendid Guildhall in the City of London. (That’s the hall at right, being addressed I think by the chairman of the Booker Prize Committee, Sir Peter Stothard). This year’s winner was Hilary Mantel for Bring Up the Bodies, the second volume in her fictionalisation of the life […]
- [Traversant la Manche](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2012/10/traversant_la_m/): Until now, I have been forced to resist the clamour brewing among both members of my extensive readership (hi, dad!) to post a bit more often: my excuse is that, in the little over a month between early September and mid-October, I have travelled back and forth from Paris to London five times, spent a weekend in the USA, started teaching a new course, and ran a half marathon. Ten one-way trips in six weeks is too many; the Eurostar makes it about as pleasant as it could possibly be: 2 1/4 hours from central London to central Paris by […]
- [Harmony in the Universe](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2012/10/harmony_in_the/): Cosmology fans in and around London: Please come here my colleague Jean–Philippe Uzan, visiting us from Paris, who will talk about “ Harmony in the Universe: between science and music” this coming Thursday, 25 October 2012 in the Huxley Building here at Imperial College. It’s free, but please contact us at astro-outreach@imperial.ac.uk if you’re going to come.
- [Cage 100](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2012/09/cage_100/): Today (September 5), John Cage would have been 100 years old. A few weeks ago, I went to the John Cage Centenary Celebration at the BBC Proms. Cage is probably best know for 4′33″, his infamous 1952 piece consisting of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence (originally in three movements — although he eventually decided to make the structure of the piece even less prescribed). That wasn’t performed the night I was at the proms, but a few evenings before by the London Sinfonietta, so I listened on the radio, and tried to use the opportunity to attend to […]
- [This sporting life](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2012/08/this_sporting_l/): [Warning, this post will be largely about sport(s), a subject I am even less qualified than usual to discuss, and so is mostly an excuse to brag about my having seen the fastest man in the world live — along with 80,000 other spectators, and post some of the pictures I was lucky enough to take.] I’ve been in Britain for more than a decade, but this summer I managed to rediscover my North American roots in the form of Baseball, courtesy of ESPN America, which shows a game or two every evening (often on delay from the previous night). […]
- [Higgs vs Religion on the Radio: no contest](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2012/07/higgs_vs_religi/): The Higgs day continues (and I’m not even a particle physicist). At about 5pm, just as I was dialling into one of my several-times-a-week Planck teleconferences, I had an email from Tim at the BBC, who works with the World Service “World Have Your Say” show, coming on at 6pm. Would I be able to come up with a one-minute analogy for the Higgs Boson? I came up with two (neither original). The first is that the Higgs field acts like treacle or molasses, inhibiting the motion of particles — and it’s exactly a resistance to motion that is the […]
- [Expat playlist](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2012/07/expat_playlist/): I am in England for Independence Day this year, having just spent last weekend back in the USA. Here’s a taste of the view from my ancestral (i.e., my parents’) home: So I’ll eat a burger in celebration, and listen to some appropriately-themed music from my playlist (in order of release): Van Morrison, Almost Independence Day Bruce Springsteen, 4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy) Bruce Springsteen (again), Independence Day X, 4th of July Galaxie 500, Fourth of July Elliot Smith, Independence Day Although there are mentions of the great American traditions of democracy, fireworks, and hot dogs, these songs dwell […]
- [Fundamental Scalar found?](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2012/07/fundamental_sca/): 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 spontaneous symmetry breaking (first applied to so-called gauge theories of particle physics in a set of 1964 papers by Higgs himself, Imperial’s Tom Kibble with Guralnik and Hagen, as well as Brout and Englert) the Higgs couples to all of the other particles in the […]
- [Future Science Bloggers Wanted](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2012/07/future_science/): Attention Imperial Postgraduates*: I’ll be helping lead a course in Science Blogging this Friday, 6 July 2012 at Imperial, along with a couple of fellow (science) bloggers: biophysicist Professor Stephen Curry and biostatistician (and actual graduate student!) Erika Cule, both of whom write at Occam’s Typewriter, an excellent grassroots network of scientist bloggers. Imperial students should still be able to sign up — if you’re taking the course (or even if you’re not), leave a comment if you’ve got any ideas for what we should discuss. *Language note: In the US, anyone with a university degree is called a “college […]
- [50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2012/06/50000000_elvis/): I wandered across Prince Consort Road from my office in the Blackett Laboratory a few weeks ago — to the Royal Albert Hall and Elvis Costello‘s Spectacular Singing Songbook tour. Elvis has settled into a comfortable phase of his career; he hasn’t quite managed a late-period resurgence — his last true masterpiece was probably Blood & Chocolate from 1988, although he’s had great songs on most of his records throughout the 90s and 2000s. Instead, he’s something of an elder (middle-aged?) statesman, showman and even teacher. And his show seems to acknowledge this, leaning heavily on songs from the 70s […]
- [Causerie - The Creation: On Cosmogony and Cosmology](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2012/05/causerie_the_cr/): A quick alert to any friends or followers in or near Rotterdam this weekend: I’ll be participating in a series of dialogs supporting The Humans, a piece of theatrical performance art sponsored by and shown at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art. The production, which will encompass a series of symposia with the process of writing and design, culminating in the play itself to be staged next Spring. It has arisen from the correspondence between artist Alexandre Singh and Defne Ayas, the new director of the Witte de With: Set before the Earth’s beginning in a proto-world populated […]
- [Bad memory. Bad law?](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2012/05/bad_memory_bad/): (Warning: this post is pretty far outside of my usual bailiwick…) I was reading today’s Guardian and came across Zoe Williams‘ sketch (in UK newspapers, this is a short, often humorous, descriptive piece, usually about an event like a parliamentary debate or court proceedings), “Rebekah Brooks lays bare the secret of her success“, recounting the appearance of former News International CEO Rebekah Brooks at the Leveson Inquiry into “phone hacking” and the too-cozy relationship between the media and politicians. The sketch was mostly remarkable for what it couldn’t say. Williams writes But ultimately, this is a ridiculous person. You couldn’t […]
- [SOLE Survivor](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2012/05/sole_survivor/): This week I received the results of the “Student On-Line Evaluations” for my cosmology course. As I wrote a few weeks ago, I thought that this, my fourth and final year teaching the course, had gone pretty well, and I was happy to see that the evaluations bore this out: 80% of the responses were “good” or “very good”, the remainder “satisfactory” (and no “poor” or “very poor”, I’m happy to say). I was disappointed that only 23 student (fewer than half of the total) registered their opinion on subjects like “The structure and delivery of the lectures” and “the […]
- [Spring Break?](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2012/04/spring_break/): Somehow I’ve managed to forget my usual end-of-term post-mortem of the year’s lecturing. I think perhaps I’m only now recovering from 11 weeks of lectures, lab supervision, tutoring alongside a very busy time analysing Planck satellite data. But a few weeks ago term ended, and I finished teaching my undergraduate cosmology course at Imperial, 27 lectures covering 14 billion years of physics. It was my fourth time teaching the class (I’ve talked about my experiences in previous years here, here, and here), but this will be the last time during this run. Our department doesn’t let us teach a course […]
- [The Sensual Universe: Touch](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2012/04/the_sensual_uni/): Imperial Astrophysics is sponsoring a new series of public lectures, “The Sensual Universe: Astrophysics for the Five Senses”. The first will concentrate on touch: The Impact of Sex In Space, presented by Dr Saralyn Mark (and unlike most of us around with a “Dr” in front of our names, Dr Mark really is an MD). Despite the name, it should be completely Safe For Work, and will happen next Tuesday, 17 April 2012 at 18:30, in Blackett Laboratory Lecture Theatre 1 here at Imperial. Attendance is free but registration is essential: email astro-outreach@imperial.ac.uk or call 020 7594 7531 stating the […]
- [TimeWave](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2012/04/timewave/): I’ve recently become involved in TimeWave, a theatre, art and technology festival to be inaugurated up in Manchester this coming November 19-24. It has been set up by the excellent lonyla (London-NY-LA) artists’ network founded by J. Dakota Powell, another American transplanted to London, taking advantage of the connections that we rootless cosmopolitans have gathered over years of transatlantic and intercontinental living and travel. How do we tell stories to each other across such vast distances in space and in culture? TimeWave itself will try to realise these long-distance links. One event, multiple locations, multiple points of view, even within […]
- [ER](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2012/03/er/): I’ve been lucky that almost everything I know about hospitals comes from fiction. But last week, having done something unpleasant to my Achilles tendon running, my local doctor sent me over to the local A&E (“accident and emergency”, the UK equivalent of the ER) to see if they could fix me up. Having been healthy and not particularly accident-prone, this was the first time since age 6 or so that I’ve been to the hospital for myself, although I’ve accompanied or visited a few friends and loved ones over the years. Britain’s NHS is, of course, a remarkable institution: universal […]
- [ICIC](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2012/03/icic/): Among the many other things I haven’t had time to blog about, this term we opened the new Imperial Centre for Inference and Cosmology, the culmination of several years of expansion in the Imperial Astrophysics group. In mid-March we had our in-house grand opening, with a ribbon-cutting by the group’s most famous alumnus. Statistics and astronomy have a long history together, largely growing from the desire to predict the locations of planets and other heavenly bodies based on inexact measurements. In relatively modern times, that goes back at least to Legendre and Gauss who more or less independently came up […]
- [On 'Jaffe'](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2012/02/on_jaffe/): Despite the last decade and a half or more of the internet, I’ve never bothered to actually work out the meaning and history of my surname, “Jaffe”. Somehow I always thought it was connected to the town of Jaffa, near Tel Aviv. But in fact, 30 seconds of searching turns up information that the name comes from the Hebrew yafeh (יפה, meaning “beautiful”) and dates at least from Rabbi Mordecai Jaffe in 16th-century Prague. I was also happy to discover that, with at least half a millennium behind us, there are plenty of interesting Jaffes in history and today (although […]
- [Roman Juszkiewicz](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2012/01/roman_juszkiewi/): I was saddened to receive a message that my friend and colleague, Roman Juszkiewicz, died earlier today. Roman was a Polish cosmologist who began his career in the Russian school, working with Ya. Zeldovich, probably the most eminent Soviet cosmologist and astrophysicist of the 20th Century. Roman himself went on to work in Paris, Berkeley, Geneva, Princeton, and of course back in Poland in both Warsaw and more recently in Zielona Gora, always doing his best to find friends and collaborators in places worth a visit. He specialised in trying to understand the growth of structures in the universe. I […]
- [Constellations](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2012/01/constellations/): Many plays about science suffer from trying to do too much, telling a story while teaching science, but Nick Payne‘s two-hander “Constellations“, now on at the Royal Court Theatre in London, has science and a scientist at its center, adding to the drama, not distracting us with jargon or science fictional twists. “Constellations” is the story of Roland and Marianne, a beekeeper and a cosmologist. Without giving away too many spoilers, I’ll say that the play tells us the story of their relationship, as it might play out in the myriad possible universes of the multiverse, each one subtly different […]
- [I think I'm a Bayesian. Am I wrong?](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2012/01/i_think_im_a_ba/): Continuing my recent, seemingly interminable, series of too-technical posts on probability theory… To understand this one you’ll need to remember Bayes’ Theorem, and the resulting need for a Bayesian statistician to come up with an appropriate prior distribution to describe her state of knowledge in the absence of the experimental data she is considering, updated to the posterior distribution after considering that data. I should perhaps follow the guide of blogging-hero Paul Krugman and explicitly label posts like this as “wonkish“. (If instead you’d prefer something a little more tutorial, I can recommend the excellent recent post from my colleague […]
- [Planck Warms Up](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2012/01/planck_warms_up/): Nearly two-and-a-half years after its launch, the end of ESA’s Planck mission has begun. (In fact, the BBC scooped the rest of the Planck collaboration itself with a story last week; you can read the UK take at the excellent Cardiff-led public Planck site.) Planck’s High-Frequency Instrument (HFI) instrument must be cooled to 0.1 degrees above absolute zero, maintained at this temperature by a series of refrigerators — which had been making Planck the coldest known object in space, colder than the 2.7 degrees to which the cosmic microwave background itself warms even the most regions of intergalactic space. The […]
- [Steve Rawlings](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2012/01/steve_rawlings/): The astronomy community in the UK and beyond suffered a terrible blow last week with the passing of Steve Rawlings, Professor of Astrophysics at Oxford. I spent quite a lot of time in Oxford a few years ago, and was lucky to get to know Steve a bit. He had spent the last several years working on the Square Kilometre Array, the massive next-generation radio telescope being developed in the UK and internationally. The detailed circumstances of his death aren’t yet known, and I hope that they remain irrelevant except for their tragic untimeliness. Much more important is that we […]
- [Me, the BBC, and Stephen Hawking](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2012/01/me_the_bbc_and/): I made it back onto the BBC today, this time to discuss Stephen Hawking on his 70th birthday (most of the people more qualified than me are actually at a meeting in his honour in Cambridge). (Actually, my very first appearance on the BBC, which generated one of my very first blog posts, was to talk about Hawking’s bet with Preskill and Thorne about the fate of information supposedly lost into a black hole — Hawking had originally claimed that a black hole destroys any information that fell into it, which would be a violation of the tenets of quantum […]
- [The Controversy about Hypothesis Testing](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2011/12/the_controversy/): I spent a quick couple of days last week at the The Controversy about Hypothesis Testing meeting in Madrid. The topic of the meeting was indeed the question of “hypothesis testing“, which I addressed in a post a few months ago: how do you choose between conflicting interpretations of data? The canonical version of this question was the test of Einstein’s theory of relativity in the early 20th Century — did the observations of the advance of the perihelion of Mercury (and eventually of the gravitational lensing of starlight by the sun) match the predictions of Einstein’s theory better than […]
- [Bluffing about Mars](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2011/11/bluffing_about/): Saturday afternoon I received a call from a news producer at the BBC — could I come talk about the Mars Science Laboratory, launched earlier that day? This was a tough question, publicity-monger though I am: I don’t actually know anything about Mars. I suppose to people outside of the very broad field of “astronomy”, studying the planets in the solar system is not very different from studying the Cosmic Microwave Background. After all, in both cases we use telescopes and satellites. But actually, the study of planets is much closer to geology (and, with increasing interest in the possibilities […]
- [Urban Sputnik, Live at Imperial](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2011/11/urban_sputnik_l/): Urban Sputnik, our collaboration with Vanessa Harden and Dominic Southgate of Gammaroot Design is currently on display at Imperial College in the main entrance of the Norman Foster-designed business school, located on Exhibition Road in London, just up the street from the Science Museum, the V&A Museum and the Natural History Museum. I’ve discussed the pieces that will be on display before, and if you’re anywhere near South Kensington in London over the next few days, please come and see them. If that piques your interest, you can hear more from us directly: on Tuesday evening, November 8, we’ll be […]
- [A Big Day for Dark Energy](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2011/10/a_big_day_for_d/): 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 doing, they found that the expansion has been speeding up for the last few billion years. This is difficult to accommodate in a Universe with matter that experiences gravity in the attractive way to which we are accustomed; instead it seems to require that the […]
- [Passion for Light](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2011/09/passion_for_lig/): It’s been a busy few weeks, and that seems like a good excuse for my lack of posts. Since coming back from Scotland, I’ve been to: Paris, for our bi-monthly Planck Core Team meetings, discussing of the state of the data from the satellite, and of our ongoing processing of it; Cambridge, for yet more Planck, this time to discuss the papers that we as collaboration will be writing over the next couple of years; and Varenna, on Lake Como in northern Italy, for the Passion for Light meeting, sponsored by SIF (the Italian Physical Society) and EPS (the European […]
- [I ramble](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2011/09/i_ramble/): I’ve spent the last few days in the northern half of Great Britain. Wednesday, I was an external examiner for a (successful!) PhD exam at the Durham University. Thursday, I was at the University of Glasgow in service to the other end of the PhD experience in the UK, giving a one-hour lecture on the Cosmic Microwave Background at the STFC summer school for incoming students. But after the summer school I woke up early for the Caledonian Sleeper up to Fort William in the Western Highlands. I rode through some of the UK’s most spectacular landscape, hills and lochs […]
- [STFC and UKSA](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2011/09/stfc_and_uksa/): Funding for space missions in the UK was split from the Science and Technology Facilities Council to the the UK Space Agency earlier this year. Very roughly, UKSA will fund the missions themselves all the way through to the processing of data, while STFC will fund the science that comes from analysing the data. To try to be a little more specific, the agencies have put out a press release on this so-called “dual key” approach: “Who does what? — Arrangements for sharing responsibility for the science programme between the STFC and the UK Space Agency.” The executive summary is: […]
- [Watch Me Move](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2011/08/watch_me_move/): I took a bit of time out from the astrophysics this week to head over to the Barbican for the “Watch Me Move” exhibition: more than a hundred years of film and video animation. From an 1880s hand-coloured “Pierrot” and Winsor McCay‘s 1911 animated version of his newspaper comic Little Nemo, to Toy Story and superheroes, most of the works took advantage of the medium to depict an unreality reflecting, but not bound by, the same laws as our everyday world. The highlight was an amazing late-1970s soviet-era film, “Tale of Tales“, beautiful and tragic, a half-hour exploration of memory, […]
- [One chance in 3.5 million](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2011/08/one_chance_in_3/): Yes, more on statistics. In a recent NY Times article, science reporter Dennis Overbye discusses recent talks from Fermilab and CERN scientists which may hint at the discovery of the much-anticipated Higgs Boson. The executive summary is: it hasn’t been found yet. But in the course of the article, Overbye points out that To qualify as a discovery, some bump in the data has to have less than one chance in 3.5 million of being an unlucky fluctuation in the background noise. That particular number is the so-called “five sigma” level from the Gaussian distribution. Normally, I would use this […]
- [Astrophysics, Clocks and Fundamental Constants](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2011/07/astrophysics_cl/): I spent last week at the Physizkentrum Bad Honnef on the Rhine, near Cologne, at conference with the name and wide-ranging remit “Astrophysics, Clocks and Fundamental Constants“. We were all there to talk about the ideas and technologies that relate those disparate fields: Can we measure what we think of as the fundamental constants of the universe (for example, the speed of light, c, or Newton’s constant of gravitation, G)? Here on Earth, this becomes the discipline of metrology, the science of measuring things. Traditionally, we would do this by comparing lengths to some standard meter stick, or masses to […]
- [Remembering Don Backer](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2011/07/remembering_don/): Today is the one-year anniversary of the death of Professor Don Backer, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley. I was a friend, colleague and collaborator of Don, and I never had the chance to appropriately memorialize him on that sad day a year ago. Don was a great radio astronomer who understood both the technical details of the equipment that he used, as well as the new science enabled by that technology. He was best known for having discovered the first millisecond pulsar — a neutron star more massive than the sun and only tens of miles across, […]
- [Urban Sputnik](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2011/07/urban_sputnik/): Urban Sputnik is a new interactive cosmology exhibit currently showing at the Royal Institution. It was created by Vanessa Harden and Dominic Southgate of Gammaroot Design collaborating with some Imperial Astrophysicists: me, Dave Clements and Roberto Trotta. Unlike my other recent foray into the science/art overlap, this one is a bit more didactic (that is, scientifically accurate!) We’ve designed five different exhibits, and, supported by an award from the STFC, Vanessa and Dominic have made two of them. One tries to show how the shape of the Universe can seem flat up close, but curved due to the mass and […]
- [Kind of Bayesian](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2011/07/kind_of_bayesia/): [Apologies — this is long, technical, and there are too few examples. I am putting it out for commentary more than anything else…] In some recent articles and blog posts (including one in response to astronomer David Hogg), Columbia University statistician Andrew Gelman has outlined the philosophical position that he and some of his colleagues and co-authors hold. While starting from a resolutely Bayesian perspective on using statistical methods to measure the parameters of a model, he and they depart from the usual story when evaluating models and comparing them to one another. Rather than using the techniques of Bayesian […]
- [Guest post: finding the most distant quasar](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2011/07/guest_post_find/): A couple of weeks ago, a few of my astrophysics colleagues here at Imperial found the most distant quasar yet discovered, the innocuous red spot in the centre of this image: One of them, Daniel Mortlock, has offered to explain a bit more: Surely there’s just no way that something which happened 13 billion years ago — and tens of billions of light years away — could ever be reported as “news”? And yet that’s just what happened last week when world-renowned media outlets like the BBC, Time and, er, Irish Weather Online reported the discovery of the highly luminous […]
- [Sepia Astronomers](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2011/06/sepia_astronome/): When cleaning out an office here in the Astrophysics Group in the Physics Department at Imperial College, we came across this photo: The background is the Mark I telescope at Jodrell Bank, and the man in the middle with the notebook has been identified as either Fred Hoyle or Francis Graham-Smith (which is more likely now that I look at it — thanks, Peter!). Do my astronomy colleagues (or anyone else) have any more information?
- [Distant objects and nearby music](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2011/06/distant_objects/): Normally, I would be writing about the discovery of the most distant quasar by Imperial Astronomers using the UKIDSS survey (using excellent Bayesian methods), but Andy and Peter have beaten me to it. To make up for it, I’ll try to get one of the authors of the paper to discuss it here themselves, soon. (In the meantime, some other links, from STFC, ESO, Gemini, …) But I’ve got a good excuse: I was out (with one of those authors, as it happens) seeing Paul Simon play at the Hammersmith Apollo: Like my parents, Paul Simon grew up in the […]
- [Copenhagen](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2011/06/copenhagen/): 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 an even greater honor to be able to speak in the same auditorium as many of the best physicists of the last hundred years. (You can see the conference photo here; apparently, the trumpet is just the latest in a long series.) I talked about […]
- [Mekonathon](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2011/05/mekonathon/): As I’ve said repeatedly, the Mekons are my favorite rock ’n’ roll band. Their music has sustained me since about 1990, after I first saw them at Chicago’s Cabaret Metro, already more than a decade into their careers. By then, they had already gone beyond their punk roots, invented alt.country avant la lettre, and skewered capitalism on Mekons Rock and Roll. But despite all the complications, they love that rock and roll, and they’ve put on several of the best shows I’ve heard, starting with that gig in Chicago, which had become a sort of hometown for this widely scattered […]
- [More from the Spherical Cows](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2011/05/more_from_the_s/): 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 in three days. The first video discusses the idea that the structure we see in the Universe today — galaxies, clusters of galaxies and the three-dimensional patterns that they form — was seeded by microscopic fluctuations traceable to the innate randomness of quantum mechanics, regions […]
- [Senses working overtime](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2011/05/senses_working/): I listened over the weekend to a story on the podcast of the radio show Studio 360 about Wanda Diaz-Merced, a blind astronomer. She is working hard at “sonification” — representing astronomical data in sound rather than in graphs. Of course, this works best for certain kinds of data — I gather from the piece that she has specialized in x-ray time series — and this seems to be the basis of her research as a graduate student at Harvard’s Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. I was bowled over by the passion and energy evident in the interview. I spend all of […]
- [Beyond Entropy and Ourselves](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2011/05/beyond_entropy_2/): Last summer, I helped make a (fake) time machine, an exercise in “creative misinterpretation” (in the words of my architect partner, Shin Egashira). This was part of the Beyond Entropy project organized by the Architecture Association — we showed it then in Venice but now Londoners will get a chance to see the work in the AA’s own gallery, opening Friday, 6 May. There will also be a series of events to mark the exhibit, including a night discussing time travel (and, um, shamanism) with Shin and photographer Goswin Schwendinger on May 20. Update: New Scientist and Nature have reviews […]
- [Submission](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2011/05/submission/): Today, our Astrophysics Group at Imperial College submitted our first application for a new STFC “Consolidated Grant“. These are intended to cover all of the astrophysics being done in the department for three years at a time, combining aspects of former so-called “standard” and “rolling” grants, both of which it replaces. (If you don’t know what those are, you probably don’t care.) It remains to be seen whether this new system ends up with the best or the worst of the two old ones, and whether it brings the promised economies of scale resulting from fewer, larger grants. For us, […]
- [Spacetacular!](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2011/04/spacetacular/): What are blogs for, if not self-publicity? In that vein, I’ll be appearing at the Spacetacular! night on April 12, in honor of Yuri’s night: the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s first-ever manned space flight. The evening is organized by Londonist editor Matt Brown along with comedian and presenter Helen Keen, hosting a line-up of comedians and scientists. I promise not to be funny so you can tell which I am — I’ll be talking for ten minutes or so about my adventures in space (well, working on a big space-based project, the Planck Surveyor Satellite). We scientists often, and […]
- [End of Term](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2011/03/end_of_term/): I’ve just finished another term, in fact the heaviest teaching load I’ve ever had at once: a twenty-six hour lecture course, three hours a week as one of several computer lab “demonstrators”, and another four hours or so per week in first-year student tutorials. For those from outside of the Imperial system: our tutorials are small group meetings during which we go over a selection of the problem sheets handed out during the week in the lecture courses; here, like most of the UK, these are not explicitly marked, but instead the students get the solutions a week or so […]
- [EBEX in Flight](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2011/03/ebex_in_flight/): Many of my colleagues in the EBEX experiment have just lit out for the west. Specifically, the team is heading off to Palestine (pronounced “Palesteen“), Texas, to get the telescope and instrument ready for its big Antarctic long-duration balloon flight at the end of the year, when we hope to gather our first real scientific data and observe the temperature and polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. Unlike the Planck Satellite, which has a few dozen detectors changed little from those that flew on MAXIMA and BOOMEReNG in the 1990s, EBEX can use more modern technology, and will […]
- [Industrial Action?](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2011/03/industrial_acti/): This week is the 100th anniversary of one of the most important events in the Labor movement (at least back in the US): the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, a disaster in which the garment factory’s sweatshop conditions led to the death of almost 150 workers, mostly Jewish immigrant women, locked by their bosses into their lower-Manhattan factory while the fire raged. This tragedy had remarkably swift and positive repercussions, spurring the growth of the once-powerful International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and resulting in a new regime of labor laws actually intended to help workers and not their employers. (The New […]
- [NAM 2011 — On the Lookout for Cosmologists](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2011/03/nam_2011_on_the/): (Apologies to the non-cosmologists and non-Brits who won’t find much of interest in the following.) This year’s UK National Astronomy Meeting will be held 17-21 April, in Llandudno, North Wales. In the usual way of British “seaside resorts” (scare quotes are certainly appropriate for that phrase) Llandudno sticks frighteningly out into the Irish Sea but, you never know, it might actually seem like Springtime when we gather there. In any event, there is a lot of astronomy going on in the UK, so NAM is a pretty big meeting, with significant communities working on everything from our solar system out […]
- [100 Years](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2011/03/100_years/): I have just had the honor of celebrating the 100th Birthday of Dora Jaffe, my grandmother, born March 14, 1911 (a date she shares with Albert Einstein!), in Shepetivka, Ukraine (then part of Russia). Her father, Leib (Lewis) Greenberg, emigrated just before the war, stranding her and her mother until they could make it across Europe and the Atlantic to New York City. Speaking only Yiddish, a summer playing in the Bronx taught her enough English to start school in the Fall, and she’s been a proud American ever since. So I know it was a pleasure for her to […]
- [Tacos and Power Spectra in LA](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2011/02/tacos_and_power/): One of the perks (perqs?) of academia is that occasionally I get an excuse to escape the damp grey of London Winters. The Planck Satellite is an international collaboration and, although largely backed by the European Space Agency, it has a large contribution from US scientists, who built the CMB detectors for Planck’s HFI instrument, as well as being significantly involved in the analysis of Planck data. Much of this work is centred at NASA’s famous Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, and I was happy to rearrange my schedule to allow a February trip to sunny Southern California (I hope […]
- [Les autres choses (scientifique)](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2011/02/les_autres_chos/): I’ve been meaning to give a shout-out to my colleagues on the ADAMIS team at the APC (AstroParticule et Cosmologie) Lab at the Université Paris 7 for a while: in addition to doing lots of great work on Planck, EBEX, PolarBear and other important CMB and cosmology experiments, they’ve also been running a group blog since the Autumn, Paper(s) of the Week et les autres choses (scientifique) which dissects some of the more interesting work to come out of the cosmology community. In particular, one of my favorite collaborators has written an extremely astute analysis of what, exactly, we on […]
- [Don Kirshner, R.I.P.](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2011/01/don_kirshner_ri/): Rock’n’roll impresario Don Kirshner, “the man with the golden ear”, but better known to members of my family as “Cousin Donny”, has died at 76. He was a fixture of American adolescence from the 50s through the 70s (when rock’n’roll was mostly about adolescence). He achieved his remarkable success behind the scenes of the music industry: producer, promoter, music publisher, manager and even occasional songwriter. He started out at the famous Brill Building, working with the songwriting duos Mann & Weil and Goffin & King and with artists like Neil Sedaka, Bobby Darin and Neil Diamond (not to mention 70s […]
- [Normal-ish](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2011/01/normal-ish/): Ok, the blog is back up. Disasters averted and the design is a little less ragged than before, but I’m not sure of the details. I want to test that I can still post, and this seems a good opportunity to solicit comments to help me refine my aesthetic sensibilities. Are the sidebars over on the right too busy? Are the fonts legible? Does everything work?
- [Oops!](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2011/01/oops/): I’ve recently “upgraded” my software which seems to be playing havoc with the format of the blog. The blog is visible, and in many ways nicer than before, but I’ve lost all of my lovely formatting… I hope we’ll be back to normal soon. In any event, you can probably ignore this and read my post about Planck’s new results instead!

## Pages

- [The Random Universe — Addenda and Errata](https://andrewjaffe.net/the-random-universe-addenda-and-errata/)
- [Andrew Jaffe](https://andrewjaffe.net/): I am a cosmologist and astrophysicist, in the Department of Physics at Imperial College London, where I am also the Director of the Imperial Centre for Inference and Cosmology. I am especially interested in the interpretation and analysis of cosmological data using principled Bayesian statistical techniques. I have written a book, The Random Universe: How Models and Probability Help Us Make Sense of the Cosmos, released in November 2025 from Yale University Press! You can order directly from the publisher in the USA or the UK, or from your favourite local or online bookseller. You can learn more about the […]
- [The Random Universe](https://andrewjaffe.net/home/): by Andrew Jaffe
- [Leaves on the Line](https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/): by Andrew Jaffe Search Recent Posts Categories


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