Short posts from Andrew Jaffe
New post: The Talk I Gave on September 12
More 25th anniversary thoughts and recollections. I was heading off to Durham, in the north of England — my first big talk now that I had started my permanent academic job. I arrived toward the end of the first day of the conference: September 11, 2001.
New post: Second test post
Here’s an excerpt!
New post: Test post
New post: 25 & 60
Twenty-five years ago, I moved from San Francisco to the UK, from a fellowship at Berkeley to a permanent job at Imperial College, London. A lot has changed since then. I was 35; now I am 60. It was two weeks before 9/11; the world hasn’t seemed as open and free since.
As of last week I’ve been living in the UK for 25 years.
Due to a booking mishap (mine) we are beset by the horror of an extra night in Southwest France.
I’ll be in New York 14–19 September. If anyone knows of a seminar slot, a podcast, a bookshop, or a living room that might want a cosmologist talking about probability, epistemology, and The Random Universe — I’d love to hear from you. Very short notice, entirely shameless.
NASA’s Roman Telescope Leaves Earth to Chart the Stars
The latest great space telescope, targeting the history and evolution of the Universe and planets around other stars, launched by NASA in collaboration with astronomers around the world.
“From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler” — a childhood favorite I’ve just finished reading with my kids, a bit younger than Claudia & Jamie in the book — was as wonderful as I remembered. Whenever we go to a museum they’ll be scouting out places to sleep, and secrets…
Jasper Johns’ “Slice”, a mashup of the CfA galaxy redshift survey, spied on a visit to the Guggenheim Bilbao. I recognised the pattern of dots — famous among cosmologists — from across the room, surprised to see it amongst Johns’ usual flags, targets, crosshatches, and numbers.
Being an atheist and born Jewish, and only having walked the last 20km of the Camino de Santiago, I was surprised to feel so moved by our arrival at the Cathedral.
Casualty, lost to the rocks of the iron-age fortifications of Os Castros de Baroña, Galicia.
“I never got to be an astronaut, but I did get to be part of the Planck Satellite team.”
—Me, interviewed by Brian Clegg on PopScienceBooks about why I do the science I do, and why I wrote The Random Universe.
UK universities face ‘financial crisis’ amid collapse in international students
University leaders are warning of financial turmoil in British higher education after new figures suggested a collapse in international student numbers would deprive the sector of vital income and undermine its future.
The problem is having so heavily relied on gouging foreign students to begin with.
The Random Universe in Physics World:
A masterful and refreshing take… I found the book’s thesis – that uncertainty is not a hindrance to knowledge, but an opportunity to learn (and learn more) about the world – simultaneously liberating, humbling and empowering.
— Chrysi Malouchou Kanellopoulou
It’s wonderful when the front page of the newspaper is about astronomy instead of, well, almost anything else.
The full image of the sun looks like a disc, but you can see the shape of the ongoing partial eclipse due to the imperfect optics of my phone camera.
Partial
Who else is off to Spain (or Iceland, or Greenland, or… ) for the eclipse?
“Man of science”
60 looking (surprisingly?!) good so far.
Thomas Bayes proved we can never be 100% certain of anything — but that probability tells us exactly how to learn anyway. That’s the core of my SXSW 2027 proposal, from the physics of the cosmos to the beliefs we live by.
Vote here (free, 30 sec) — closes Aug 23.
Exactly two years ago, we were on the first day of our sabbatical year, starting in Indonesia but with extended stays in Tsukuba, Japan; New York City; and Leiden, Netherlands. We’ve been back almost a year but I still think about our year abroad every day.
Clafoutis
Peter Coles points out, I fear with some justification, that the recent STFC cuts to high-profile fields of physics like astronomy, cosmology, and particle physics might have as much (or more) to do with internal conflicts and jealousy within physics as with financial issues.
This is only of niche interest, but it’s great to be at the Sterrewacht group at the University of Leiden, drinking from an old-school early-90s vintage CITA (Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics) mug.
This White House paper marks a huge change to US science funding, trying to pick tech winners, alongside its efforts to align science with its right-wing ideology.
For a party supposedly against communism, they are doing their best to reproduce some of the worst excesses of the soviet state.
UK Science moves from DSIT to DBIST. Should we be worried? (I have no idea.)