In the Dark

Further to my recent post about the evidence for a low-density Universe, I thought I’d embarrass all concerned with this image, taken in Leiden 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, curvature parameter and age of the Universe).

From left to right we have Alain Blanchard (AB), Bernard Jones (BJ, standing), John Peacock (JP), me (yes, with a beard and a pony tail – the shame of it), Vincent Icke (VI), Rien van de Weygaert (RW) and Peter Katgert (PK, standing). You can see on the blackboard that the only one to get anywhere close to correctly predicting the parameters of what would become the standard cosmological model was, in fact, Rien van de Weygaert.

This entry was posted on September 25, 2009 at 5:12 pm and is filed under Biographical, The Universe and Stuff with tags cosmological parameters, Cosmology, density parameter, Leiden. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.