In the Dark

It’s been a very busy day back to teaching after last week’s study break. This week there’s a big meeting in Leiden (Netherlands) which I would like to have attended as it combines the annual Euclid Consortium meeting with the 56th ESLAB Symposium. No doubt there’ll be a lot of discussion of the Euclid Q1 results announced last week. I can’t go, however, because of teaching commitments. The Euclid meetings are quite often scheduled in the summer, so I have a chance to attend, but not this time.

Anyway, I thought I would post a relevant memory from a previous trip to Leiden, about 30 years ago. which was taken at a conference in Leiden (Netherlands) in 1995. Was that really 30 years ago? 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 March 24, 2025 at 8:32 pm and is filed under Biographical, The Universe and Stuff with tags cosmological parameters, Cosmology, 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.