Cosmic Horizons

It is now the twilight zone between Christmas and New Year. 2016 has been a difficult and busy year, and my recreational physics and blogging has suffered. But it is time for a rebirth and I plan to get back to the writing about science and space here. But here's some things from 2016. A Fortunate Universe: Life in a finely tuned cosmos  was published. This has sucked up a huge amount of time and mental activity, and that continues. I will blog about the entire writing and publishing process at some point in the future, but it really is quite a complex process with many mine-fields to navigate. But it is done, and am planning to write more in the future. We also made a video to advertise the book! I've done a lot of writing in other places, including  Cosmos magazine on "A universe made for me? Physics, fine-tuning and life" , and commentary in  New Scientist  and several articles in  The Conversation  including Peering into the future: does sci...

First, the usual apologies! It's been an age since I have written here, but, as you know, the life of the academic is a busy one! Especially since I have just completed a book which is to be published next year. More on that journey later, but today a little post about academic toolkits. This is something that I have written about before, and I know some of my colleagues and peers disagree with me, but that's fine as I think it illustrates that there is no single recipe for success in academia (Am I a success in academia? That's for others to judge, but I am still here after twenty years :). What makes a "good" academic? In modern academia, we have to be specialists, focused on a generally tiny part of the immense enterprise called science. When ever I realise this,  Kenneth Williams  springs immediately to mind Crossing boundaries and commenting on other areas of science that are not in your domain is met with suspicion and attack, and it's not just  ...