A lot of us have been waiting for a long time to hear this news! The NANOGrav collaboration has announced strong evidence of a background of low frequency gravitational waves emitted from supermassive black hole mergers. Their detection methods are pulsar timing arrays (still one of those fantastically simple, cool … Click to continue reading this post
Jupiter (with some moons) and Saturn, 21st December 2020 (click for larger view) [/caption]
But… while the viewing on the 21st (the peak of the conjunction) was perfect, seeing three of the Galilean moons, and the glorious rings of Saturn, very clearly, getting a decent through-the-lens photo was not so trouble-free. I was dissatisfied with the roughs of the photos I got that night, with lots of blurring and aberrations that I felt I should have been able to overcome. So I spent the next day taking the telescope entirely apart, checking everything, and trying to colimate it properly, and testing schemes for better vibration stabilisation of the camera. I was ready for another session of photographing the next night, but it was cloudy, with only about […] Click to continue reading this post
Well, I did what I said I’d try in the previous post. And it worked! I had a great time viewing the conjunction. I hope you did too if you found a moment and clear skies My photography was hampered by either poor stabilisation of the camera or a misalignment … Click to continue reading this post
[caption id="attachment_19735" align="aligncenter" width="499"]
Broken Telescope![/caption]There’s an exciting astronomical conjunction tonight! Jupiter and Saturn (that you may have noticed have been approaching each other in the sky steadily over the course of the year) will be at their closest approach! It has already been a lovely sight in the evening sky over the last many days. Since I’d been doing a bit of observation and photography of each planet in July (click on the two below for some blurry (but exciting to me) offerings…see more photos I shared on social media – I don’t think I posted them directly here), I’ve been wondering what sort of views I might be able to […] Click to continue reading this post
[caption id="attachment_19729" align="aligncenter" width="499"]
Andrea Ghez accepting the 2020 Nobel Prize for Physics[/caption]You know, it is easy (and healthy) to be steadfastly cynical about the whole prize thing, but sometimes it is just great to simply cast that aside and get into the spirit of it. This is one such time. The Nobel Prize ceremony was today and you can watch the whole thing on YouTube here. (Physics starts at about 36 minutes in.) My interest was in the moments Andrea Ghez and Roger Penrose picked up (literally this year) their prizes for their wonderful work on black boles. The picture I was able to screen grab of Andrea in particular says it all.
I’ve met Andrea Ghez on an number of occasions (and communicated electronically on many more), usually because of our joint interest in making science accessible to the public through talks (where we first met during K C Cole’s excellent Categorically Not! series), TV shows (where we’ve sometimes connected behind the scenes, in the context of shows or films we’re both in, or thinking of being in), and so forth. All our interactions have been […] Click to continue reading this post
Well I did not get the special NYT issue as a keepsake, but this is maybe better: I got to attend the first presentation of the “black hole picture” scientific results at a conference, the APS April meeting (Sunday April 14th 2019). I learned so much! These are snaps of … Click to continue reading this post
Yes, it’s a black hole all right. Following on from my reflections from last night, I can report that the press conference revelations were remarkable indeed. Above you see the image they revealed! It is the behemoth at the centre of the galaxy M87! This truly groundbreaking image is the … Click to continue reading this post
Well, I’m off to get six hours of sleep before the big announcement tomorrow! The Event Horizon Telescope teams are talking about an announcement of “groundbreaking” results tomorrow at 13:00 CEST. Given that they set out to “image” the event horizon of a black hole, this suggests (suggests) that they … Click to continue reading this post
Oh, look what I found! It is my talk “Black Holes and Time Travel in your Everyday Life”, which I gave as the Klopsteg Award lecture at AAPT back in July. Someone put it on YouTube. I hope you enjoy it!
Two warnings: (1) Skip to about 6 minutes to start, to avoid all the embarrassing handshaking and awarding and stuff. (2) There’s a bit of early morning slowness + jet lag in my delivery here and there, so sorry about that. 🙂
Embed:
Abstract: […] Click to continue reading this post
After a conversation over coffee with one of the event planners over at the Natural History Museum, I had an idea and wandered over to talk to Angella Johnson (no relation), our head of demo labs. Within seconds we were looking at some possible props I might use in an event at the NHM in February. Will tell you more about it later!
For your listening pleasure: I’ve been asked to do a number of longer interviews recently. One of these was for the “Futuristic Podcast of Mark Gerlach”, who interviews all sorts of people from the arts (normally) over to the sciences (well, he hopes to do more of that starting with me). Go and check out his show on iTunes. The particular episode with me can be found as episode 31. We talk about a lot of things, from how people get into science (including my take on the nature vs nurture discussion), through the changes in how people get information about science to the development of string theory, to black holes and quantum entanglement – and a host of things in between. We even talked about The Dialogues, you’ll be happy to hear. I hope you enjoy listening!
(The picture? Not immediately relevant, except for the fact that I did cycle to the place the recording took place. I mostly put it there because I was fixing my bike not long ago and it is good to have a photo in a post. That is all.)
Don’t forget, today live on Science Friday we (that’s SciFri presenter Ira Flatow, producer Christie Taylor, Astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan, and myself) will be talking about Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” once more, and also discussing some of the physics discoveries that have happened since he wrote that book. We’ll be taking (I think) caller’s questions too! Also we’ve made recommendations for further reading to learn more about the topics discussed in Hawking’s book.
Join us!
-cvj
(P.S. The picture above was one I took when we recorded for the launch of the book club, back in July. I used the studios at Aspen Public Radio.) Click to continue reading this post
Friday will see me busy in the Radio world! Two things: (1) On the WNPR Connecticut morning show “Where We Live” they’ll be doing Summer reading recommendations. I’ll be on there live talking about my graphic non-fiction book The Dialogues: Conversations about the Nature of the Universe. Tune in either … Click to continue reading this post
Turns out that Frank Buckley, the news anchor at KTLA 5, is not just a really great guy (evident from his manner on TV), but also a really excellent interviewer with a sharp curiosity that gives me hope that great journalism is still alive, well, and in good hands. I showed up at the station expecting to just have a pleasant chat around the book and be done with it, but I walked into the room and he’d done all his research and was sitting with extensive notes and so forth about lots of physics ideas he’d read in the book that he wanted to talk about! So we have a blast talking about the physics of our universe and the world around us in some in-depth detail. It was fantastic, and just the kind f conversation I hope that the book celebrates and inspires people to have!
Check out our interview here (embed below), and be sure to tune in to his […] Click to continue reading this post
Tomorrow I’ll be giving a talk at the North Carolina Science Festival! The talk will be about black holes, time, space, movies, and books, held inside the historic Morehead planetarium. I’ll sign the book for you after if you want.
Here is a link to the event.
(On the plane over, rather than doing my usual sketch-a-face-from-a-magazine exercise you might be familiar with from earlier posts, e.g. here, I made some new sketches for use in the talk. One of those is above.)
