The Random Universe

June 2006

  • Cash for cosmology

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    Congratulations to my colleagues Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess and Brian Schmidt! They are sharing the rather lucrative Shaw Prize for their leadership in the late 1990s discovery that the Universe seems to be accelerating in its expansion. In particular, through painstaking observational campaigns over many years, they observed that distant supernovae — exploding stars whose…

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  • I thought that was my job

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    “Physics Elevated to an Art Form” — Oakley‘s new tag line.

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  • New York (Times) Stories

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    I’m just back from New York, remembering life back in the US-of-A for a week or so. I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time reading the New York Times; for all the very real problems it’s shown on the news side over the last few years, its feature writing retains an amazing breadth and depth,…

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  • Ineluctable modality of the visible

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    Today, June 16, is Bloomsday, the day that Joyce’s Ulysses takes place in 1904.

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  • Alternative crackpots

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    The New Statesman, a lefty British politics magazine (which just underwent a snazzy revamp), published a column by Ziauddin Sardar, an otherwise perceptive writer, entitled “When Knowledge is not the answer.” Without putting too fine a point on it, it is the stupidest essay I have read in a long time. He is responding to…

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  • Sacred Music

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    Last night I went to hear Alejandro Escovedo at St James Church in London. As an atheist/Jew, I’ve never really gotten used to churches (and this really is a church, not a performance space), can’t help but want to be respectful of the sanctity of the space. Escovedo brought along his string quintet, and the…

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