Become a Better Singer Instantly!

Most people sound like better singers inside their own heads than they do to others. This is mostly because the perception of a voice sounding rich has a lot to do with the presence of high harmonics above the fundamental frequency of the note – pretty much the same reason why a banjo sounds different [...]

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General Relativity and Meta-Expertise

My physics education, like everyone’s, has a few weak points. One of those weak points for me was general relativity. My introduction to it was in an honours mathematics course, which started easily enough with some familiar special relativity, until about the 4th lecture. This particular lecture proceeded as follows:
Lecturer: “You’re all familiar with tensors, [...]

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Everything in Its Right Place

Word on the street is that, after setting the record for quickest ever emendations—clocking in at about eight minutes worth of work—our own Matthew Francis has completed his thesis, titled: ‘Dark energy, cosmic structure and the expansion of space’.  He is, as ever, understated: “More of a shopping list than a title really.” But a [...]

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Dark Matter

On the arXiv yesterday was a twenty-five page review of the topic of dark matter by Jaan Einasto*, at a good level for suggesting to interested non-experts. It covers briskly the historical progress of ideas, but with some weight put on the period of activity in the 1970s that focussed on the aggregate dynamics of [...]

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Where do I stand on maximum entropy?

My title is taken from a similarly titled article by the physicist Ed Jaynes, whose work influenced me greatly. It refers to a controversial idea of epistemological probability theory: the method of maximum entropy, that was popularised and (arguably) invented by Jaynes. This principle states that, when choosing probabilities on a discrete hypothesis space, subject [...]

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ArXiv Filtering

While of course I endorse as diverse a reading of the preprint archives as is possible, we all know that there’s simply too much that goes on there for every paper to get even the most cursory of glances, let alone a proper viewing. My strategy has been to reduce the daily postings to a [...]

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The Cost of Motorcycling

When I decided to get my motorbike licence a few years ago, one of the reasons for doing so was the cost. Bikes (new or used) are cheaper than cars and use less petrol. Being on an APA at the time, price was a compelling issue. Other advantages include sexiness, fun, less environmental impact (relative [...]

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“These aren’t crackpots arguing against the Big Bang…”

Sean Carroll provides a dégustation of recent literature on expanding space, including one work from the proprietors of this blog; the post seems to have been provoked by this recent diatribe on the subject. I am hopeful that the attention the subject is receiving might lead to it being treated as more than an issue [...]

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The LHC and the End of the World

We can’t let the official “switch-on” of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) pass without comment. The goal of the LHC is to find the Higgs Boson, the last particle of the standard model of particle physics (“the standard model”) that has yet to appear in the debris of a collision in a particle accelerator. The [...]

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Are The Dice Loaded?

I am currently reading Universes (1989) by John Leslie, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at The University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada. The book, praised on the back cover by Antony Flew and Quentin Smith, discusses the issues surrounding the “fine-tuning” of the constants of nature, initial conditions, and even the forms of the [...]

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