On the good ship Volendam

I'm back! But where have I been? I've spent on 10 days on a cruise ship, the m/s Volendam. Here's what she looks like.
I wasn't just enjoying myself, I was there to lecture astronomy. The trip trundled from Darwin to Perth, calling in at the islands of Komodo and Lombok in Indonesia.

To pay my way, I had to give five lectures. I wasn't sure who the audience was (it turned out to be mainly people over 60, but from a range of nations), so I talked on
  • The Secret Lives of Galaxies
  • The Big and Small of Stars
  • How to fall into a Black Hole
  • Just what happened at the Start of the Universe
  • Dark Energy and the Long Term Future of the Universe
As well as me, there was also Victor Gostin of the University of Adelaide, who spoke on the geology and geophysics of South East Asia and Australia - did you know there was a now drowned continent called Sundaland (not to be confused with Sunderland!)? I didn't, and I think it was cool. Here's a map from wikipedia.
Anyway, I think that the lectures were well received. It was good fun, and people were very interested (it was hard to get more than a few feet at times without people asking questions). I would happily do it again.

There were a bunch who were not interested in talking tho, and they lived on the island of Komodo. No matter what you said, they never cracked a smile, and when they want to go for a walk, you just get out of their way. Here they are
They looked pretty big in the zoo in Sydney - they looked larger in the wild!

Anyway, astronomy has moved anon while I was traveling, so I have a few posts to catch up on. More soon.

Location: Sydney NSW, Australia

Comments

  1. Ggreybeard11 November 2012 at 23:06

    Holland America Line ------> just as well it wasn't a G(r)eek ship!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous13 November 2012 at 09:10

    Sounds like a great way to spend 10 days!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Falling into a black hole: Just what do you see?

Image
Everyone loves black holes. Immense gravity, a one-way space-time membrane, the possibility of links to other universes. All lovely stuff. A little trawl of the internets reveals an awful lot of web pages discussing black holes, and discussions about spaghettification, firewalls, lost information, and many other things. Actually, a lot of the stuff out there on the web is nonsense, hand-waving, partly informed guesswork. And one of the questions that gets asked is "What would you see looking out into the universe?" Some (incorrectly) say that you would never cross the event horizon, a significant mis-understanding of the coordinates of relativity. Other (incorrectly) conclude from this that you actually see the entire future history of the universe play out in front of your eyes. What we have to remember, of course, is that relativity is a mathematical theory, and instead of hand waving, we can use mathematics to work out what we will see. And that's what I did. ...
Read more

Journey to the Far-Side of the Sun

Image
There was a movie, in the old days, Journey to the Far-Side of the Sun  (also known as Doppleganger) which (spoiler alert) posits that there is a mirror version of the Earth hidden on the other side of the Sun, sharing the orbit with our Earth. The idea is that this planet would always be hidden behind the Sun, and so we would not know it there there. This idea comes up a lot, over and over again. In fact, it came up again last week on twitter. But there's a problem. It assumes the Earth is on a circular orbit. I won't go into the details here, but one of the greatest insights in astronomy was the discovery of Kepler's laws of planetary motion , telling us that planets move on elliptical orbits. With this, there was the realisation that planets can't move at uniform speeds, but travel quickly when closer to the Sun, while slowing down as their orbits carry them to larger distance.  There has been a lot of work examining orbits in the Solar System, and you can  s...
Read more

Moving Charges and Magnetic Fields

Image
Still struggling with grant writing season, so another post which has resulted in my random musings about the Universe (which actually happens quite a lot). In second semester, I am teaching  electricity and magnetism to our First Year Advanced Class . I really enjoy teaching this class as the kids are on the ball and can ask some deep and meaningful questions. But the course is not ideal. Why? Because we teach from a textbook and the problem is that virtually all modern text books are almost the same. Science is trotted out in an almost historical progression. But it does not have to be taught that way. In fact, it would be great if we could start with  Hamiltonian and Lagrangian  approaches, and derive physics from a top down approach. We're told that it's mathematically too challenging, but it really isn't. In fact, I would start with a book like  The Theoretical Minimum , not some multicoloured compendium of physics. We have to work with what we have! ...
Read more