Science – microblog

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.

Man in blue shirt holding a white mug with a red maple leaf and the letters “ICAT” in white on red.

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.)

Good (depressing) discussion of the effect of the large cuts to the UK’s astrophysics and particle physics programs. (The government’s own “explainer” is not very good…).

The Random Universe reviewed in Nature Astronomy:

The book works. It takes you from the reliability of London buses to the Big Bang in a circuitous but continuous path, leaving you with an accomplished feeling of having slotted parts of the Universe and parts of our understanding into their logical places.

Another London pub talk! Come hear me discuss The Random Universe and the Big Bang at Pints Of Knowledge on 16 June at The Blues Kitchen in Brixton.

The good news: The Random Universe is the “#1 New Release in Cosmology”.

The bad news: a friend and cosmology colleague has found the first error in the book.

Unboxing The Random Universe

Lots of fun recording an episode of the Mindscape podcast with Sean Carroll. Should appear on November 10, just before the release of The Random Universe.

Congratulations to Imperial’s Professor Michele Dougherty, the UK’s new Astronomer Royal!

I wish people would stop using “non-parametric” to mean “model with many parameters”.

I’ve arrived at QUP (full name: International Center for Quantum-field Measurement Systems for Studies of the Universe and Particles) at the KEK lab in Tsukuba, Japan, for the start of my sabbatical. I’ll be here through December.

More cosmic topology from the Compact Collaboration: we show that the global structure of space can induce parity violation in cosmological observables — which usually requires small-scale parity-violating particle (micro-) physics.

On our recent Compact Collaboration PhysRevLett: Anticipating future discoveries: Scientists explore nontrivial cosmic topology

Former Imperial College Astrophysics PhD student Alfredo Carpineti quoted about last night’s spectacular aurora in this morning’s (New York) Times

Do you remember how your science teachers told you that all numbers had to have error bars? This is why.

Scientists say most likely number of contactable alien civilisations is 36

This.

“There is concern that there should only be one public message about the science. But there isn’t such a thing as ‘the science’. There are lots of different sciences.”

Keep quiet on two-metre rule, Sage experts told

Dennis Overbye in the NY Times on the latest rumours: Expected Soon: First-Ever Photo of a Black Hole.

Yes, paradoxically, a picture of a black hole, or at least its shadow.

Even better, an op-ed from my colleague @SheerPriya, At Long Last, a Glimpse of a Black Hole.

RIP Scott Walker, possibly the only person ever to write a song about a brown dwarf (an astronomical object, heavier than a planet, lighter than a star).

Congratulations to newly-minted Imperial Astrophysics PhD, Dr Ciarán Conneely! It’s been a pleasure supervising him and learning from and with him about his thesis topic, “Application of Cosmic Microwave Background Techniques to a Gravitational Wave Stochastic Background”.