Simulated mission to Mars

A week ago, ESA initiated a call for applicants to participate in a simulated round-trip mission to the Red Planet, which will involve being inside a sealed facility for more than 500 days performing what I presume are relatively uncreative tasks that require plenty of concentration. Some further descriptive content has appeared on their website [...]

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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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The shape of cosmic structures: background

[Updated! New bonus paragraphs on galaxies and the underlying dark matter density field.]
They’re everywhere, but not just anywhere; individually significant but collectively monumental; completely variegated, yet somehow all the same. They’re galaxies, of course, and they’re more than just a cosmographic map of the Universe: the pattern swept out by the millions of galaxies whose [...]

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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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Galaxy surveys in a periodic geometry

Have just had a nice week working at Mount Stromlo Observatory and am looking forward to the coming week in Melbourne (generally) and Swinburne (particularly). Yesterday and the day before I was working on a small problem that grew out of a larger project (which I’m sure I’ll return to at a later date, just [...]

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Statistics of triangulated point distributions

So this morning was unusual not in my having an interesting idea, but in pursuing it. This idea, not likely to be wholly or even partly original—I don’t want to search through journal articles only to disappoint myself just yet, & wouldn’t know where to look anyway—is about the clustering of points.

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Ceci n’est pas votre science!

There is no reason to believe that we would have a common point of discussion about science or mathematics with intelligent extra-terrestrial life-forms. Or so says André Kukla in his now not-so-recent (I started writing this a while back) BJPS article, worth reading in full if you’ve access through your institution or someone else’s, & [...]

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Diagramm der Nacht

Mind you, it doesn’t have much competition because I’ve spent an hour-and-a-half writing its m-script.

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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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