December 2009
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Doctors, Deep Fields and Dark Matter
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Luckily, not all the astrophysics news this week was so bad. First, and most important, two of our Imperial College Astrophysics postgraduate students, Stuart Sale and Paniez Paykari, passed their PhD viva exams, and so are on their ways to officially being Doctors of Philosophy. Congratulations to both, especially (if I may say so) to…
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Cuts
I presume that anyone reading this blog knows that today is the day when the great unwashed masses of UK Astronomers heard about our financial fate from the STFC, the small arm of the UK government responsible for Astrophysics, Particle Physics and Nuclear Physics. For various reasons, some clear and others manifestly not, STFC is…
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Physics vs Poetry
When I’m traveling I try to read the New Yorker — a transatlantic flight usually gets me through most of an issue. I was even more interested than usual when I picked up the issue at Heathrow and found the front-cover blurb, “Physics vs Poetry: New fiction by Ian McEwan”. McEwan is thought of as…
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Bayesian Methods in Cosmology
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The perfect stocking-stuffer for that would-be Bayesian cosmologist you’ve been shopping for: As readers here will know, the Bayesian view of probability is just that probabilities are statements about our knowledge of the world, and thus eminently suited to use in scientific inquiry (indeed, this is really the only consistent way to make probabilistic statements…
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Obligatory post on climate change
The Institute of Physics is weighing in on the issue of climate change, so I thought I would take the opportunity to try to dumb things down as much as possible. The basic science behind climate change is well-understood: The mean temperature is increasing, with significant variation superposed from place to place and year to…
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