Tag Archives: Cosmology

Social Physics & Astronomy

When I give popular talks about Cosmology,  I sometimes look for appropriate analogies or metaphors in television programmes about forensic science, such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation which I watch quite regularly (to the disdain of many of my colleagues and friends). Cosmology is methodologically similar to forensic science because it is generally necessary in…Read More…

  • Posted in Uncategorized
  • Also tagged astronomy, Bertillonage, Florence Nightingale, Quetelet, sociology, statistics,

Last days on the Ice

Originally posted on SPIDER on the Ice:Four of the last five of the SPIDER crew– Don, Ed, Sasha, and I– are slated to leave the Ice tomorrow morning. That means this is probably my last blog post– at least until SPIDER 2! It has been an incredible few months, but I can’t say I’m…Read More…

Cosmology – Confusion on a Higher Level?

I’ve already posted the picture below, which was taken at a conference in Leiden (Netherlands) in 1995. Various shady characters masquerading as “experts” were asked by the audience of graduate students at a summer school to give their favoured values for the cosmological parameters (from top to bottom: the Hubble constant, density parameter, cosmological constant,…Read More…

A new proposal for a fifth force experiment

Milla Jovovich in “The Fifth Element”I still find it amazing that all I see around me is made up of only some dozens particles and four interactions. For all we know. But maybe this isn’t all there is? Physicists have been speculating for a while now that our universe needs a fifth force to maintain…Read More…

  • By Sabine Hossenfelder
  • December 30, 2014
  • Posted in science
  • Also tagged Papers, Physics

Planck Talks Online!

After yesterday’s frivolity, I return to community service mode today with a short post before a series of end-of-term meetings. You may recall that not long ago  I posted an item about a meeting in Ferrara which started on 1st December and which  concerned results from the Planck satellite. Well, although the number of new…Read More…

10 things you didn’t know about the Anthropic Principle

“The anthropic principle – the idea that our universe has the properties it does because we are here to say so and that if it were any different, we wouldn’t be around commenting on it – infuriates many physicists, including [Marc Davis from UC Berkeley]. It smacks of defeatism, as if we were acknowledging that…Read More…

  • By Sabine Hossenfelder
  • December 6, 2014
  • Posted in science
  • Also tagged Physics

Negative Mass in General Relativity?

[Image Source: Ginva.com]Science News ran a piece the other week about a paper that has appeared in PRD titled “Negative mass bubbles in de Sitter spacetime”. The Science News article is behind a paywall, but don’t worry I’ll tell you everything you need to know.The arxiv version of the paper is here. Since I’m quoted…Read More…

  • By Sabine Hossenfelder
  • November 29, 2014
  • Posted in science
  • Also tagged Papers, Physics

Vanishing dark matter could point to a dark future for our Universe

A study conducted at the University of Rome and the University of Portsmouth is suggesting that the amount of dark matter in the cosmos, the catalyst that facilitates the creation of new stars and galaxies, is decreasing as it interacts with dark energ…Read More…

  • By Dario Borghino
  • November 5, 2014
  • Posted in Uncategorized
  • Also tagged Cosmic Microwave Background, Dario Borghino, Dark Energy, Dark Matter, , Universe, University of Portsmouth, University of Rome

Three Minutes of Cosmology

Not much time today to do anything except help one of my former Cardiff PhD students become a Youtube sensation by sharing this video of Ian Harrison, who now works in the Midlands, at the University of Manchester. Here he is talking about part of his PhD work for just three minutes without repetition, hesitation,…Read More…

Why Cosmology Isn’t Boring

As promised yesterday, here’s a copy of the slides I used for my talk to the ~150 participants of the collaboration meeting of the Dark Energy Survey that’s going on here this week at Sussex. The title is a reaction to a statement I heard that recent developments in cosmology, especially from Planck, have established…Read More…

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