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...

Wow!!! Where has time gone! I must apologise for the sluggishness of posts on this blog. I promise you that it is not dead, I have been consumed with a number of other things and not all of it fun. I will get back to interesting posts as soon as possible. So, here's a couple of articles I've written in the meantime, appearing in The Conversation One on some of my own research:  Dark matter and the Milky Way: more little than large And the other on proof (or lack of it) in science:  Where’s the proof in science? There is none There's more to come :)

Sorry, I've been traveling. I'll be posting soon, but please check out a recent article of mine over at the Conversation called  Have Cosmologists Lost their Minds in the Multiverse?

A new article in The Conversation called The Challenge of the Modern Scientist is to Avoid Career Suicide . Happy to discuss this in more detail below

Lightening post, as I've got to get on with cooking some Tandoori Chicken! I've written my thoughts on the  recent reports that the oldest star in the Universe  has been found in an article in  The Conversation . It's a great discovery, but I take a swipe at scientific reporting. More soon. ps - I'm now followable on twitter at  @Cosmic_Horizons

Quick post. I've taken a bit of a hiatus from publishing in The Conversation  for a while, for mildly political reasons that I will talk about some day. But I decided to get back on this horse and have written an article called  Grey is the new black hole: is Stephen Hawking right? I'll let you have a read and I'll be happy to answer questions below. But for now, here's "Colin"

It's the week for submission of Discovery Projects , our main funding route through the Australian Research Council. Our current proposal is almost 150 pages long, and I feel like we've been working on it since the Cosmological Dark Ages . It will be good to submit it, but don't think that means I get a break. No, it's time to catch up on all the stuff that has been on the back-burner when grant writing :) So, a quick post today on an article I wrote for The Conversation called "Cutting through the spin on supermassive black holes" . As the name suggests, I describe how astronomers can not only measure the mass of black holes, but can also calculate their spin. I must admit that the article is a little long compared to others I've written for The Conversation, and what is published is the shortened version. It's a topic that I think is pretty cool and I put in too much detail. I'll let you read the article, and will happily answer any que...

A quick post today to follow-up my previous Andromeda post. I've published an article in The Conversation titled Cosmic dance challenges our understanding of the universe which describes the result. I've covered most of this in the previous post, but a slightly different spin. Enjoy.

Today is a busy day, with the allocation of supercomputer time though ASTAC and the announcement of the 2012 Excellence in Research for Australia , which always leads to robust "discussion", and board of examiners meetings. So, only time for a quick post. A new article in The Conversation on the controversial topic of "Are we living in a Synthetic Universe?". It's called Alert: you may be living in a simulated universe . Given the comments, I could have alternatively called it "Baiting philosophers is easy and fun", but have a read yourself and let me know what you think.

A very quick post tonight, but I've had an article published in The Conversation titled Open-access science: be careful what you wish for . This is a word of caution on the push to make all science, bother the publications and data paid for with public money, available to all. To cut a long story short, I fully support this move. I would love my science to be read by all (well, at least those who are interested :). The caution is, however, that doing this costs. The current funding model is a bit busted; scientists need to publish in established journals, as articles that do not appear in the "highest impact journals" are not considered as important. But the journals are owned by big publishing houses, and so libraries need to pay for access to the papers, often to see the science generated by their own researchers. It's a bit of a complex mess. Anyway, my caution is that while the funding for open source science has to come from somewhere, it is not good...

It's been a little while, but I have written a new article for The Conversation in response to some screaming headlines earlier in the week. Here's the claim from the Sydney Morning Herald . Heady stuff! The Big Bang, the mass of evidence and interpretation gathered over the last century, is about to be rewritten! This is important stuff (well, to me at least), and headlines everywhere breathlessly trumpeted that we are entering a new era in cosmological understanding. So, I read the paper which appears in a very reputable, Phys Rev D. Here it is Huh? I don't see the words cosmology, big bang, rewritten etc anywhere there. Alas, we have another case of notion that science can only be sold if its significance is overblown. Press releases must challenge the orthodox, shift the paradigm and "rewrite the textbooks". If we went by press-releases, serious researchers would be constantly burning their textbooks and giving Amazon a roaring trade!  This ...

A quick post this morning as I have spent a few hours plumbing in a new dishwasher (the previous one decided it would like to be like the Nile, and so flooded every so often), and have a children's party this afternoon. But, I've had a new article published on The Conversation titled Scary monsters (and supermassive black holes) . It's a review of the discovery of the  most massive supermassive black holes yet . As I note in the article, the discovery itself is not such a surprise as we know that there is a well known relation, the  M-sigma relation which shows that larger galaxies have larger black holes (the astronomers in the article weren't just blindly looking for black holes - they knew where to look). Also, in the article, I touch on another article in The Conversation called Black holes might exist, but let’s stay sceptical , which was in response to a previous article I published on black holes. This article seemed to suggest that astronomers believe ...

After a weekend of great rugby (from the Welsh, the English and Australians were rather blah), I have responded to a good question posted over at The Conversation on distances in the Universe. It's a question that gets raised quite a bit and basically put it goes something like If the Universe began 13.7 billion years ago, when the distance between any pair of points was zero, how can anything be more than 13.7 billion light years away? The answer is the difference between local motions and global motions. Here's the response I posted An excellent question, and one which may not make sense to start with. We know from special relativity, nothing can travel faster than light (recent neutrino claims excepted). But in reality, special relativity says that nothing can go faster than the speed of light **locally**, so in a small box, if I try and race an electron and a photon across the box, the photon will win. With the expanding universe, the question we are a...

A quick post today, as I am running behind on a couple of things, but I have had a book review published in The Conversation . The book is The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: Why the Universe Is Not Designed for Us by Victor Stenger, and is on a topic I have thought a lot about over the year, but never published on, namely "why are we here, in this Universe"? For those of a religious inclination, the answer is apparently obvious, the Universe was fine tuned to be habitable. For those grounded in a more scientific approach to understanding the Universe, the answer is not so clear and straight forward. If we start to play around with the fundamental physical parameters, such as the strength of forces etc, it appears we end up with mainly dead Universes. Heck, even messing with the content of the universe, in terms of the amount of matter, ends up with universes that collapse too quickly, or expand so fast that stars (and hence people) cannot form.  I think it is safe to say th...

Well, after saying that I am not much of a star person, my article on the sizes of stars was just published in The Conversation . It's titled They might be giants: a mind-blowing sense of stellar scale and covers the size of stars from red dwarfs to hypergiants. The mini-cusps appear in the article as well :) For a quick review, I fully recommend this video on YouTube; It makes my head hurt a little every time I watch it.

And just to round off this first day of posting, here's a link to my other article in The Conversation , namely " Adventures in the dark side of cosmology ". This was in response to a press-release titled " Dark Energy is Real " which recently came out of the " WiggleZ ", and is a bit of a comment on what " real " means in cosmology.  By the way, WiggleZ is not pronounced "Wiggle-Zee", or "Wiggle-Zed", but after an Australian Cultural Icon .

As an opening post to this blog, I have very recently published an article in The Conversation entitled " Will we ever see the Big Bang? "