Search results for: “Planck”
-
[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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…