January 2012
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Roman Juszkiewicz
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I was saddened to receive a message that my friend and colleague, Roman Juszkiewicz, died earlier today. Roman was a Polish cosmologist who began his career in the Russian school, working with Ya. Zeldovich, probably the most eminent Soviet cosmologist and astrophysicist of the 20th Century. Roman himself went on to work in Paris, Berkeley,…
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Constellations
Many plays about science suffer from trying to do too much, telling a story while teaching science, but Nick Payne‘s two-hander “Constellations“, now on at the Royal Court Theatre in London, has science and a scientist at its center, adding to the drama, not distracting us with jargon or science fictional twists. “Constellations” is the…
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I think I’m a Bayesian. Am I wrong?
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Continuing my recent, seemingly interminable, series of too-technical posts on probability theory… To understand this one you’ll need to remember Bayes’ Theorem, and the resulting need for a Bayesian statistician to come up with an appropriate prior distribution to describe her state of knowledge in the absence of the experimental data she is considering, updated…
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Planck Warms Up
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Nearly two-and-a-half years after its launch, the end of ESA’s Planck mission has begun. (In fact, the BBC scooped the rest of the Planck collaboration itself with a story last week; you can read the UK take at the excellent Cardiff-led public Planck site.) Planck’s High-Frequency Instrument (HFI) instrument must be cooled to 0.1 degrees…
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Steve Rawlings
The astronomy community in the UK and beyond suffered a terrible blow last week with the passing of Steve Rawlings, Professor of Astrophysics at Oxford. I spent quite a lot of time in Oxford a few years ago, and was lucky to get to know Steve a bit. He had spent the last several years…
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Me, the BBC, and Stephen Hawking
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I made it back onto the BBC today, this time to discuss Stephen Hawking on his 70th birthday (most of the people more qualified than me are actually at a meeting in his honour in Cambridge). (Actually, my very first appearance on the BBC, which generated one of my very first blog posts, was to…
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