July 2011
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Astrophysics, Clocks and Fundamental Constants
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I spent last week at the Physizkentrum Bad Honnef on the Rhine, near Cologne, at conference with the name and wide-ranging remit “Astrophysics, Clocks and Fundamental Constants“. We were all there to talk about the ideas and technologies that relate those disparate fields: Can we measure what we think of as the fundamental constants of…
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Remembering Don Backer
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Today is the one-year anniversary of the death of Professor Don Backer, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley. I was a friend, colleague and collaborator of Don, and I never had the chance to appropriately memorialize him on that sad day a year ago. Don was a great radio astronomer who understood both…
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Urban Sputnik
Urban Sputnik is a new interactive cosmology exhibit currently showing at the Royal Institution. It was created by Vanessa Harden and Dominic Southgate of Gammaroot Design collaborating with some Imperial Astrophysicists: me, Dave Clements and Roberto Trotta. Unlike my other recent foray into the science/art overlap, this one is a bit more didactic (that is,…
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Kind of Bayesian
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[Apologies — this is long, technical, and there are too few examples. I am putting it out for commentary more than anything else…] In some recent articles and blog posts (including one in response to astronomer David Hogg), Columbia University statistician Andrew Gelman has outlined the philosophical position that he and some of his colleagues…
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Guest post: finding the most distant quasar
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A couple of weeks ago, a few of my astrophysics colleagues here at Imperial found the most distant quasar yet discovered, the innocuous red spot in the centre of this image: One of them, Daniel Mortlock, has offered to explain a bit more: Surely there’s just no way that something which happened 13 billion years…
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