Archive for the Talks and Reviews Category

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Virtually in Chile

Posted in Maynooth, Open Access, Talks and Reviews with tags , , , on November 4, 2025 by telescoper

Today has been a very busy day. I had a one-hour lecture on Partial Differential Equations from 11-12 this morning and a two-hour lecture on Ordinary Differential Equations from 2-4 this afternoon. In between those instead of having a lunch break, I was virtually in Chile giving a talk via Teams about the Open Journal of Astrophysics at LISA 10. That is not LISA as in the Laser Interferometric Space Antenna, but LISA as in Library and Information Services in Astronomy. I was invited to attend this in person, and would have gone, had it not clashed with teaching, as I have never set foot in Chile nor anywhere else in South America.

The talk went well and I had a number of questions and comments.

I got up early this morning to publish a paper taking our total so far to 399. By an unfortunate coincidence there was some problem with the integration between Crossref and our Scholastica platform so the publication didn’t go through properly. When I returned after my afternoon lectures, however, I found that whatever the problem was, it had sorted itself out; the paper is here.

The last talk I gave of this kind was May 2025, and the slides for that talk indicate that OJAp had published 293 papers so we have published over 100 papers in the 6 months since then. Unless there is another glitch tomorrow I expect we’ll reach 400 in the morning.

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A Time Out in Cosmology

Posted in Biographical, LGBTQ+, Talks and Reviews, The Universe and Stuff with tags , on June 26, 2024 by telescoper

Regular readers of this blog – both of them – may recall that earlier this month I gave the inaugural Pride Lecture in the Physics Department at Oxford University. That lecture was given in person but also  streamed via Zoom. This is just an update to let you know that a recording of that stream is now available here should you wish to view it:

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To Saclay

Posted in Biographical, Open Access, Talks and Reviews with tags , on November 28, 2023 by telescoper

I am up early this morning ahead of a trip to Saclay, best known for CEA Saclay and the relatively new Paris-Saclay University, which involves an approximately 30-minute trip on an RER to Le Guichet, followed by road transport. It’s anomalous that Saclay itself is not served by either train or Metro, though I am told there are plans.

The only significant annoyance about yesterday’s journey was that the WIFI was hopeless, so I had to catch up with a lot of things last night and have more to do today. Still, my talk is this morning so I should have plenty time this afternoon and evening before heading back to Barcelona tomorrow.

Here are the slides I used for my talk, which was virtually identical to the one given at Montpellier last week.

Update: It has been a long day. I’m now back in the hotel in Port-Royal. The new Paris-Saclay campus is very impressive. The IPhT is a bit older and of a different style but is a nice working environment. Thanks to everyone there for their hospitality and especially for the splendid lunch after my talk!

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Caption Competition!

Posted in Biographical, Talks and Reviews, The Universe and Stuff on September 8, 2023 by telescoper

Our roaming photographer took some pictures during my public talk on Wednesday night. This one seems ripe for a caption competition. Please submit your entries through the comments box below:

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The Universe from Einstein to Euclid

Posted in Biographical, Talks and Reviews with tags , , on September 7, 2023 by telescoper

As we head into the Day 2 of the ITP2023 I thought I’d share the slides I used for the public talk I gave last night. We had an audience of around a hundred which wasn’t bad given that it is graduation week and the undergraduates aren’t back!

Here is the abstract used to advertise the talk:

Euclid is the name of a new scientific mission from the European Space Agency, launched on July 1st, designed to explore the composition and evolution of the Universe. The Euclid mission takes its name from the ancient Greek mathematician regarded by many as the Father of geometry. Until the last century, Euclid’s theorems were assumed not just to be mathematical notions, but to describe the geometrical structure of the physical Universe. Einstein’s general theory of relativity swept that idea aside and gave us new ways of describing space, by unifying it with time, and by allowing it to be affected by matter in a manner very different from that formulated by Euclid. Over the past century, this theory has proved to be very effective at describing the properties of the Universe as observed by modern astronomical telescopes, while also suggesting the existence of dark matter and dark energy.

The Euclid telescope will create an enormous map of the large-scale structure of the Universe across space and time by observing billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years, across more than a third of the sky. Euclid will explore how the Universe has expanded and how galaxies and clusters of galaxies have formed over cosmic history, and how space itself is distorted by these structures.

This talk will discuss our modern ideas of space and time, how the Euclid mission will try to test whether or not they are correct and shed light on the nature of dark matter and dark energy.

And here are the slides:

Obviously I cut a number of long stories very short, which probably contributed to why I had a lot of questions from the audience at the end of the talk. I always assume that’s a basically a good sign because it shows people are interested, but it also makes me worry that I didn’t explain things very well!

We didn’t finish until past 9 o’clock and it was a very warm evening, so I was very happy to have a few pints afterwards in O’Neills…

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An Evening of Weird Matter at MU!

Posted in Maynooth, Talks and Reviews, The Universe and Stuff with tags , on August 28, 2023 by telescoper

With just over a week to go, I thought I’d post a reminder that Maynooth University is hosting a theoretical physics meeting early next month, from September 6th to 8th; for details see here. It has been decided that there will be a couple of public evening lectures as a double-header on the first night of the conference. One of the speakers is me. Technically I’ll be on sabbatical from September 1st but I’ve delayed my travels to allow me to ive this talk. Anyway, the advert is here:

You can join us for this “evening of science celebrating the weird and wonderful ways that matter can manifest in our universe” by getting a ticket at Eventbrite below.

Register on Eventbrite

Tickets are free but you do need to register in advance!

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Weird Matter at MU!

Posted in Maynooth, Talks and Reviews, The Universe and Stuff with tags , on August 19, 2023 by telescoper

I mentioned a while ago that Maynooth University is hosting a theoretical physics meeting early next month, from September 6th to 8th; for details see here. It has been decided that there will be a couple of public evening lectures as a double-header on the first night of the conference. One of the speakers is me. Technically I’ll be on sabbatical from September 1st but I’ve delayed my travels to allow me to ive this talk. Anyway, the advert is here:

You can join us for this “evening of science celebrating the weird and wonderful ways that matter can manifest in our universe” by getting a ticket at Eventbrite below.

Register on Eventbrite

Tickets are free but you do need to register in advance!

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Last Call for Exploring the Cosmos

Posted in Maynooth, Talks and Reviews, The Universe and Stuff with tags , on October 5, 2022 by telescoper

A couple of weeks ago I announced that we’re holding a Space Week event here at Maynooth University called Exploring the Cosmos. Well, the inexorable march of time means that event is actually tomorrow so I’m posting this as a last chance for you to register, which you can do here.

The demand for tickets so far has been a bit overwhelming. So much so, in fact, that we’ve moved to a bigger room, organized microphones, and enlisted various people to help, e.g. to guide people into the venue. Fortunately all I have to do is give the last talk and then go to the pub.

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Fuzzy Cosmology at ITP2022

Posted in Biographical, Talks and Reviews, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on May 26, 2022 by telescoper

As I usually do when I give a talk (which hasn’t been for a while) I’ve uploaded the slides for the presentation I gave at the Irish Theoretical Physics meeting at DIAS this morning. The title of the talk was Fuzzy Cosmology and the abstract reads:

I discuss some applications of the Schrodinger-Poisson wave-mechanical approach to
cosmological structure formation. The most obvious use of this formalism is to “fuzzy” dark matter,
i.e. dark matter consisting of extremely light particles whose effective de Broglie wavelength is
sufficiently large to be astrophysically relevant, but it can be used to model more general scenarios
and has a number of advantages over standard methods based on Eulerian perturbation theory. I
illustrate the formalism with some calculations for cosmic voids and discuss its application to the
cosmological reconstruction problem(s).

I think it went reasonably well despite there being a hitch at the start because the touchpad on my laptop stopped working. Fortunately I was able to produce an emergency mouse. Anyway, here is a picture of me taken during the talk to prove I was there..

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The Time of the Pandemic

Posted in Biographical, Books, Talks and Reviews, Covid-19, Science Politics, Talks and Reviews with tags , , , , on May 11, 2022 by telescoper

I’ve posted before about the way the Covid-19 pandemic has played havoc with my perception of the passage of time and today I’ve experienced another example because I was reminded that it was on this day (11th May) last year that I received my first shot of Covid-19 vaccine.

It’s very hard for me to accept that it was just one year ago that I was waiting in City West to get my injection as it seems in my memory further back than that in my memory. It’s not only how long ago things happened, but also even the sequence of events that has become muddled. I wonder how long it will take to restore any normal sense of these things?

Anyway, I’ve just updated the daily statistics on this blog and although case numbers remain relatively high they do seem to be falling steadily and things do seem to be under control in terms of hospital admissions and deaths. Only 254 people are in hospital with Covid-19 today and the trend is downward.

Maybe the time of the pandemic is drawing to a close?

Further evidence that things may be getting back to normal is that I’m giving the first in-person research talk I’ve done since before the pandemic started at the Irish Theoretical Physics Meeting (ITP22) at the end of this month in Dublin (at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, to be precise). I’m looking forward to giving a talk in the same room as real people. I’m even top of the bill (though only thanks to alphabetical order):

I’ve only got a 30-minute slot so I hope my sense of the passage of time returns at least to the extent that I keep to schedule. My PhD student is travelling to Newcastle next week to give her first ever conference talk at the UK Cosmology Meeting. Hers is a 5-minute talk, which is quite a difficult thing to do well, but I have every confidence it will be excellent.

And talking of research, I see that tomorrow sees the public announcement of the results of the 2021 Research Excellence Framework. Universities have had their results since the start of the week but they are embargoed until tomorrow, no doubt to allow PR people to do their work. I’ll probably post a reaction tomorrow, but for now I’ll just send best wishes to colleagues in the UK – especially in Cardiff and Sussex – who are waiting anxiously hoping for a successful outcome and say that I’m very happy to be here in Ireland, out of the path of that particular bureaucratic juggernaut.

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