by Andrew Jaffe
It’s been exactly two years since the start of our sabbatical year away from England, and almost a year since we returned. I’m only now understanding the shape of that year and the effect it had on me, my science, and my family. Imperial College has a competitive process for requesting sabbatical leave: you have [ ]
As a scientist in the later stages of my career, the managerial and mentorship load has increased, leaving less time for math and programming. These technical activities were also why I wanted to be a scientist in the first place, and I regretted losing the time for this hands-on research. Formerly the core of my [ ]
After living in Japan for about four months, we left in mid-December. We miss it already. One of the pleasures we discovered is the onsen, or hot spring. Originally referring to the natural volcanic springs themselves, and the villages around them, there are now onsens all over Japan. Many hotels have an onsen, and most [ ]
My old friend Marc Weidenbaum, curator and writer of disquiet.com, reminded me, in his latest post, of the value of blogging. So, here I am (again). Since September, I have been on sabbatical in Japan, working mostly at QUP (International Center for Quantum-field Measurement Systems for Studies of the Universe and Particles) at the KEK [ ]
If you’re reading this, then you might realise that I haven’t posted anything substantive here since 2018, commemorating the near-end of the Planck collaboration. In fact it took us well into the covid pandemic before the last of the official Planck papers were published, and further improved analyses of our data continues, alongside the use [ ]
Another aspect of Planck s legacy bears examining. A couple of months ago, the 2018 Gruber Prize in Cosmology was awarded to the Planck Satellite. This was (I think) a well-deserved honour for all of us who have worked on Planck during the more than 20 years since its conception, for a mission which confirmed a [ ]
This week, we released (most of) the final set of papers from the Planck collaboration the long-awaited Planck 2018 results (which were originally meant to be the Planck 2016 results , but everything takes longer than you hope ), available on the ESA website as well as the arXiv. More importantly for many astrophysicists and cosmologists, [ ]
I have the unfortunate duty of using this blog to announce the death a couple of weeks ago of Professor Leon B Lucy, who had been a Visiting Professor working here at Imperial College from 1998. Leon got his PhD in the early 1960s at the University of Manchester, and after postdoctoral positions in Europe [ ]
It was announced this morning that the WMAP team has won the $3 million Breakthrough Prize. Unlike the Nobel Prize, which infamously is only awarded to three people each year, the Breakthrough Prize was awarded to the whole 27-member WMAP team, led by Chuck Bennett, Gary Hinshaw, Norm Jarosik, Lyman Page, and David Spergel, but [ ]
The first direct detection of gravitational waves was announced in February of 2015 by the LIGO team, after decades of planning, building and refining their beautiful experiment. Since that time, the US-based LIGO has been joined by the European Virgo gravitational wave telescope (and more are planned around the globe). The first four events that [ ]
More technical stuff, but I m trying to re-train myself to actually write on this blog, so here goes For no good reason other than it was easy, I have added a JSONfeed to this blog. It can be found at http://andrewjaffe.net/blog/feed.json, and accessed from the bottom of the right-hand sidebar if you re actually reading this [ ]
This is a technical, nerdy post, mostly so I can find the information if I need it later, but possibly of interest to others using a Mac with the Python programming language, and also since I am looking for excuses to write more here. (See also updates below.) It seems that there is a bug [ ]
[Update: I have fixed some broken links, and modified the discussion of QBism and the recent paper by Chris Fuchs thanks to Chris himself for taking the time to read and find my mistakes!] For some reason, I ve come across an idea called Knightian Uncertainty quite a bit lately. Frank Knight was an economist of [ ]
I recently finished my last term lecturing our second-year Quantum Mechanics course, which I taught for five years. It s a required class, a mathematical introduction to one of the most important set of ideas in all of physics, and really the basis for much of what we do, whether that s astrophysics or particle physics or [ ]
Like everyone else in my bubble, I ve been angrily obsessing about the outcome of the US Presidential election for the last two weeks. I d like to say that I ve been channelling that obsession into action, but so far I ve mostly been reading and hoping (and being disappointed). And trying to parse all the explanations for [ ]
O Rose thou art sick. The invisible worm, That flies in the night In the howling storm: Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy: And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy. William Blake, Songs of Experience
It s been a year since the last entry here. So I could blog about the end of Planck, the first observation of gravitational waves, fatherhood, or the horror (comedy?) of the US Presidential election. Instead, it s going to be rock n roll, though I don t know if that s because it s too important, or not important [ ]
In an occasionally thoughtful but mostly silly attempted takedown of the so-called New Atheists (Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and such), philosopher John Gray writes that there is an irresolvable contradiction between viewing religion naturalistically as a human adaptation to living in the world and condemning it as a tissue of error and illusion. -John [ ]
[Update: The bug seems fixed in the latest version, 10.0.2.] I am in my third year teaching a course in Quantum Mechanics, and we spend a lot of time working with a very simple system known as the harmonic oscillator the physics of a pendulum, or a spring. In fact, the simple harmonic oscillator [ ]
Briefly (but not brief enough for a single tweet): I ll be speaking at Loncon 3, the 72nd World Science Fiction Convention, this weekend (doesn t that website have a 90s retro feel?). At 1:30 on Saturday afternoon, I ll be part of a panel trying to answer the question What Is Science? As Justice Potter Stewart once [ ]
A quick heads-up on some recent and upcoming events: A couple of weeks ago, I delivered my long-delayed (if not actually long-awaited) inaugural lecture, The Random Universe . A video is currently available through Imperial College s media library so you can hear me opine on how we learn about the history and evolution of the Universe [ ]
As the academic year winds to a close, scientists thoughts turn towards all of the warm-weather travel ahead (in order to avoid thinking about exam marking). Mostly, that means attending scientific conferences, like the upcoming IAU Symposium, Statistical Challenges in 21st Century Cosmology in Lisbon next month, and (for me and my collaborators) the usual [ ]
[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 m recently back from my mammoth trip through Asia (though in fact I m up in Edinburgh as I write this, visiting as a fellow of the Higgs Centre For Theoretical Physics). I ve already written a little about the middle week of my voyage, observing at the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, and I hope to get [ ]
After a couple of days of lousy weather, the sky cleared up and dried out Wednesday. Eventually, we got down to 0.08 not quite the best possible conditions, but good enough for almost anything we might want to do. We started out slightly worse than that, but that meant we got to observe more [ ]
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 [ ]
Some time last year, Physics World magazine asked some of us to record videos discussing scientific topics in 100 seconds. Among others, I made one on cosmic inflation and another on what scientists can gain from blogging, which for some reason has just been posted to YouTube, and then tweeted about by FQXi (without which [ ]
Nearly a decade ago, blogging was young, and its place in the academic world wasn t clear. Back in 2005, I wrote about an anonymous article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, a so-called advice column admonishing academic job seekers to avoid blogging, mostly because it let the hiring committee find out things that had nothing [ ]
The academic year has begun, and I m teaching our second-year Quantum Mechanics course again. I was pretty happy with last year s version, and the students didn t completely disagree. This year, there have been a few changes to the structure of the course although not as much to the content as I might have liked [ ]