The Universe and Stuff

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Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics 04/07/2026

It’s Saturday again so it’s time for another update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further seven papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 136 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 584.

I will continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience); these announcements also show the DOI for each paper.

The first paper to report this week, published on Monday 29th June, is “Analysis and implications of the spatio-spectral morphology of the Fermi Bubbles” by Ami Tank (Indian Institute of Technology) and Roland Crocker & Mark R. Krumholz (Australian National University). Published in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena, this paper presents an analysis of An analysis of the gamma-ray structures of Fermi Bubbles in the Milky Way using a decade of data. The research suggests either hadronic or leptonic processes can explain the data.

The overlay for this paper is here

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:

The second paper for this week, also published on Monday 29th June, but in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics, is “A first measurement of baryonic feedback with Fast Radio Bursts” by Robert Reischke (Universität Bonn, Germany) and Steffen Hagstotz (Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München, Germany). This paper argues that Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) provide a new method to trace baryon distribution and feedback in the cosmos, offering insights into matter distribution and rejecting no-feedback scenarios with high confidence.

The overlay looks like this:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

The third paper of the week, published on Tuesday 30th June in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena, is “Idealized Global Models of Accretion Disks with Strong Toroidal Magnetic Fields” by Minghao Guo & Eliot Quataert (Princeton U., USA), Jonathan Squire (U. Otago, NZ), Philip F. Hopkins (Caltech, USA) and James M. Stone (Princeton). This study uses global magnetohydrodynamic simulations to explore the behavior of idealized accretion disks with strong toroidal magnetic fields, finding that these systems maintain a moderately strong mean azimuthal field.

The overlay for this one is here:

The final, accepted version can be found on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

The fourth paper of the week, published on Tuesday 30th June in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena, is “On the effective spin-mass ratio relation of binary black hole mergers that evolved in isolation” by Sambaran Banerjee (Helmholtz-Instituts für Strahlen und Kernphysik, Germany) and Aleksandra Olejak (MPA Garching, Germany). This study explores mechanisms of binary black hole mergers and finds that certain spin and mass ratio trends can be naturally explained by isolated binary evolution. The overlay for this one is here:

You can read the final version of this one on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

The fifth paper of the week, also published on Tuesday 30th June but in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics is “A systematic survey for hypervelocity runaways from thermonuclear supernovae” by Kareem El-Badry (Caltech, USA), and 18 others based in the USA, Germany, Austria and the UK. This paper presents a systematic survey of hypervelocity runaways, resulting from white dwarf explosions in binary systems. The findings suggest a diversity of remnant masses, ages, and heating mechanisms, challenging theoretical models.

The overlay for this one is here:

You can read the final version of this one on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

The sixth and penultimate paper of this week is “Boris and Exponential Integrators in the Theory of Particles Interacting with Magnetic Turbulence” by Andreas Shalchi (U. Manitoba, Canada). This was published on Wednesday 1st July, in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (it is posted in the plasma physics section of aXiv but cross-listed in solar and stellar astrophysics). The study compares the Rodrigues and Boris integrators in test-particle simulations of charged particles interacting with magnetic fields, finding both methods yield similar results.

The overlay for this one is here:

You can find the final accepted version on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

The seventh and final paper for this week is “Inflation at the End of 2025: Constraints on $r$ and $n_S$ using the Latest CMB and BAO Data” by Lennart Balkenhol (Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, France) and 12 others based in France, Italy, Switzerland, UK, USA and Australia. This was also published on Wednesday 1st July, in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. This study presents constraints on parameters of inflationary models in cosmology, using the latest cosmic microwave background and baryon acoustic oscillation data. The findings help differentiate between inflation models.

The overlay for this one is here:

You can find the final accepted version of this one on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

And that concludes this week’s update. We’re starting to catch up on the backlog generated in June. At just past the halfway point of the year, which is where we are, we’re on 136 papers, which suggests a total around 272 for the year.

Structures on Gigaparsec Scales?

Posted in Astrohype, The Universe and Stuff with tags arXiv:2607.01172, cosmological principle, Cosmology, DESI DR1, Francesco Sylos-Labini, galaxy surveys, Marco Galoppo, Till Sawala on July 2, 2026 by telescoper

The latest in a sequence of claims of very large scale structures in the distribution that violate the cosmological principle emerged a week or so ago with a paper in Nature. The paper is behind a paywall but here is the abstract:

I’ve been nudged a few times by various people to comment on that but I’ve been busy recently and didn’t have time to look at the paper in detail. I had a quick look today and the thing that immediately struck me was that I didn’t understand the mock catalogues they used to compare the ΛCDM model with the observations. I still don’t understand that but I’ve stopped worrying about it because today I received a preprint (not behind a paywall, but on arXiv) from Till Sawala with the title The local galaxy distribution does not violate the cosmological principle and the (rather devastating) abstract:

The cosmological principle, which states that the Universe is statistically homogeneous and isotropic on sufficiently large scales, is a foundational assumption of the standard cosmological model. A recent analysis of DESI DR1 galaxy samples reported coherent anisotropic features in the local galaxy distribution extending to gigaparsec scales. If correct, this result would directly contradict the cosmological principle and motivate inhomogeneous cosmologies. Here I analyse the same data and compare them with galaxy distributions predicted by the FLAMINGO cosmological hydrodynamic simulation, performed in the standard ΛCDM paradigm. I show that the apparent anomaly disappears when the correct comoving distance scale is used. I also show that, rather than violating the cosmological principle, the observed structures are consistent with those expected in a ΛCDM Universe.

Here’s Figure 9 of the Sawala paper.

It seems that the authors of the Nature paper, Francesco Sylos Labini and Marco Galoppo, misinterpreted the distances of galaxies in the DESI DR1 sample in a way which boils down to an error of a factor (1+z)/h, where z is the redshift and h represents the Hubble constant. This hugely increases the scale and distorts the pattern of galaxy clustering. Using the correct comoving distance the measured structures are completely consistent with ΛCDM.

Oops!

P.S. I’ve stopped worrying about the mock surveys…

3 Comments »

In a Random Universe…

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Biographical, Books, OJAp Papers, The Universe and Stuff with tags A Random Universe, Andrew Jaffe, Artificial Intelligence, From Cosmos to Chaos on June 30, 2026 by telescoper

So here I am, in that London. I’m attending a small meeting called A Random Universe which is celebrating the occasion of the 60th Birthday of cosmologist Andrew Jaffe. The meeting is being held at ~~South Kensington Technical~~ Imperial College and covers cosmology, statistics, topology, and a number of other things. The title comes from a book Andrew has published:

I’m ashamed to admit I haven’t read it yet – it was published last year – but I will do. An amusing thing is that I wanted to use that title for a book I wrote some time ago but the publisher rejected it! I also noticed just now that the book uses the definite article whereas the conference has the indefinite article.

I had other things to do yesterday so I missed the first day of the meeting, and my train into London was delayed by an hour because of “a cow on the line”, which necessitated a lengthy diversion via Coventry, so I missed much of this morning too. I did make some use of the time, though, publishing three papers in the Open Journal of Astrophysics using a commendably stable Wi-Fi connection on the train.

One thing I didn’t miss, however, was an interesting panel discussion under the title AI and Inference. There wasn’t much about inference in the discussion, but it did cover some interesting ground. Cosmologists are well used to Machine Learning, which is often claimed to be a form of Artificial Intelligence, though I wouldn’t classify it as such. In fact,the large survey analyses that constitute a major part of contemporary cosmological research would not be feasible without the deployment of machine learning methods. I think it’s likely that newer methods of Generative AI and Agentic systems based on Large Language Modules will lead to increases in scientific productivity in the short term too. Whatever happens in the longer term, several years in the future, is very hard to predict, but is likely to invilve big changes in the way science is done. I’ll just say that I’m not sorry that I will be retiring in two years!

Apparently the “Holy Grail” of the Tech Bros is to find ways of creating artificial “General Intelligence”. There was an audience vote about whether this would be accomplished with the five years or so some claim. I abstained, on the grounds that I really don’t know what “General Intelligence” is supposed to mean in the first place. I would also remind readers that the Holy Grail was an object of dubious significance the Quest for which consumed considerable resources and ultimately failed.

Another topic that came up is whether AI methods will ever be truly creative. This is an interesting question because I don’t think we know very much about how creativity in any form, including the intuitive leaps that have led to advances in science, arises in human brains. I wrote a post about “Light-bulb” moments here.

One immediate effect of LLMs on science is in the publishing world. At OJAp we are experiencing a tidal wave of AI-generated slop and other garbage. This is very wearisome and I think will only get worse. We don’t rule out the use of AI in papers at OJAp, but authors must disclose what they have done and how they have tested it. Things may change in the future, but I think that in the current era of science the big problem is not that AI methods can’t be used by good scientists for good research but that AI methods make it far too easy for fools to generate superficially plausible nonsense. I don’t see any easy solution to this but maybe there is an upside, in that will hasten the end of the system of academic publishing which has in any case long outlined its usefulness.

1 Comment »

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics 27/06/2026

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags arXiv:2505.10611v2, arXiv:2512.09021v3, arXiv:2606.24158v1, Astrophysics of Galaxies, Circumgalactic Medium, Diamond Open Access, Diamond Open Access Publishing, Dual Disk Galaxies, galactic structure, galaxy formation, galaxy haloes, High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena, Machine Learning, massive black holes, nuclear transients, Open Access, Open Access Publishing., Tidal Heating on June 27, 2026 by telescoper

It’s Saturday again so it’s time for another update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further three papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 129 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 577.

I will continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience); these announcements also show the DOI for each paper.

The first paper to report this week, published on Tuesday 23rd June, is “Interpretable machine learning of halo gas density profiles: a sensitivity analysis of cosmological hydrodynamical simulations” by Daniele Sorini & Sownak Bose (Durham University, UK), Mathilda Denison (U. Penn., USA) and Romeel Davé (University of Edinburgh, UK). This study uses cosmological hydrodynamical simulations and a random forest algorithm to understand how feedback processes affect the gas distribution in galaxies by predicting gas density profiles in various models. It is published in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies.

The overlay for this paper is here

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:

The second paper for this week, published on Wednesday June 24th in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies is “Dual-disk galaxies and thermal states of circumgalactic medium” by Masafumi Noguchi (Tohoku University, Japan). This paper explores the suggestion that the transition from thick to dual-disk galaxies is influenced by thermal changes in the circumgalactic medium (CGM), which also affects star formation.

The overlay looks like this:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

The third and finnal paper of the week, published on Friday 26th June in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena, is “Mass Transfer in Tidally Heated Stars Orbiting Massive Black Holes and Implications for Repeating Nuclear Transients” by Philippe Z. Yao and Eliot Quataert (Princeton University, USA). This paper discusses how tidal heating alters the structure of stars near supermassive black holes, affecting mass transfer rates and potentially leading to low-luminosity active galactic nuclei and transient stellar phenomena.

The overlay for this one is here:

The final, accepted version can be found on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

And that concludes this week’s update. It has been another slow week on the publishing front. We have a steadily growing backlog of papers accepted for publication but with final versions yet to appear on arXiv. I suppose it’s the holidays…

P.S. The other day I checked the stats for the Open Journal of Astrophysics and saw that we’ve passed 8,000 citations. The average number of citations per paper is 14.0, which is not bad when you consider that over half the papers were published under a year ago…

Euclid Stares at the Galactic Bulge

Posted in Euclid, The Universe and Stuff with tags ESA Euclid, Euclid, exoplanets, Galactic Bulge, Galactic Centre, gravitational microlensing, Milky Way on June 24, 2026 by telescoper

Time for another update from ESA’S Euclid Space Mission: today is Q2 Day!

The largest and most detailed photo ever made of the Galactic Centre in visible light was taken by the Euclid mission. For just one day (23rd March 2025), Euclid turned its gaze towards the extremely bright inner region of our Milky Way galaxy, known as the galactic bulge. The extraordinary picture that resulted is not part of Euclid’s main cosmological survey, which is designed to look at objects far outside our own Galaxy, but was made in response to a special request from astronomers who were after what Euclid does best: capturing large areas of the sky in crisp detail. Packed with more than 60 million stars, this image opens the door for scientists to confirm the existence of any exoplanet found in this region and measure its mass using tiny changes in starlight over time. The observational data obtained in this project were released today as Euclid’s Q2 data release; for details of Q1 please see here.

Designed to observe billions of faraway galaxies, the space telescope’s visible light camera is sensitive enough to tell apart individual stars in our super-crowded galactic bulge, without being blinded. This ability is crucial for what scientists want to use this image for: studying planets around other stars using a special technique called gravitational microlensing.

For comparison, Euclid’s sharpness and sensitivity in visible light is similar to the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s wide field camera. But each pointing that Euclid captures in a few hours spans an area 270 times larger than Hubble’s field of view. To observe the same Euclid mosaic, the Keck Observatory would need around 2000 hours. Euclid is faster, and able to capture details from fainter stars that would be otherwise missed when observing from the ground. This single mosaic also encompasses the entire region that the upcoming Roman space telescope will monitor for planet hunting.

You can learn more about this by visiting the official account of this on the ESA website and/or watching this video:

1 Comment »

Summer Solstice 2026

Posted in History, The Universe and Stuff with tags Summer Solstice on June 21, 2026 by telescoper

The Summer Solstice in the Northern hemisphere ~~takes~~ took place this morning, Sunday 21st June 2026, at 9.24am local Irish Time (08.24 UTC). Among other things, this means that tomorrow is the longest day of the year around these parts. According to this website, the interval between sunrise and sunset in Dublin today will be 17 hours 4 minutes and 52 seconds. which is 2 seconds longer than yesterday, while tomorrow will be two whole seconds shorter.

The Earth orbits the Sun once a year in a nearly circular orbit. The Earth’s axis of rotation (the straight line through the center of the Earth between the north and south poles) is not perpendicular to the plane of the Earth’s orbit. The Earth’s axis is tilted by about 23.4° from the the direction perpendiular to the orbital plane:

The orientation of the Earth’s axis in space remains nearly constant even as the Earth revolves around the Sun. It always points in the general direction of the star Polaris. The result is that when the Earth is on one side of its orbit, the South Pole is tilted toward the Sun (by as much as 23.4°) and the Southern Hemisphere experiences summer. Six months later, when the Earth is on the opposite side of its orbit, the North pole is tilted toward the Sun (by as much as 23.4°) and the Northern Hemisphere experiences summer.

On the Summer Solstice, Earth’s maximum axial tilt toward the Sun is 23.4°. Likewise, the Sun’s declination from the celestial equator is 23.4°. In areas outside the tropics, the Sun reaches its highest elevation angle at solar noon on the summer solstice. At the North Pole the Sun doesn’t set at all on the Summer Solstice.

So in a sense it’s all downhill from today until the Winter Solstice in December, but the nights won’t start drawing in just yet. Days will indeed get shorter from tomorrow, although this does not mean that sunset will happen earlier tomorrow than it does today. In fact it is a little later; the latest sunset will be on 25th June. Nor does it mean that today sees the earliest sunrise. Sunrise this morning was a little later than yesterday; the earliest sunrise was actually on 17th June.

This arises because there is a difference between mean solar time (measured by clocks) and apparent solar time (defined by the position of the Sun in the sky), so that a solar day does not always last exactly 24 hours. A description of apparent and mean time was given by Nevil Maskelyne in the Nautical Almanac for 1767:

Apparent Time is that deduced immediately from the Sun, whether from the Observation of his passing the Meridian, or from his observed Rising or Setting. This Time is different from that shewn by Clocks and Watches well regulated at Land, which is called equated or mean Time.

The discrepancy between mean time and apparent time arises because of the Earth’s axial tilt and the fact that it travels around the Sun in an elliptical orbit in which its orbital speed varies with time of year (being faster at perihelion than at aphelion).

You can read a piece about the cultural importance of the solstice over the years here.

4 Comments »

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics 20/06/2026

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags arXiv:2510.00292v5, arXiv:2602.09104v2, arXiv:2603.15899v2, arXiv:2604.07336v2, Astrophysics of Galaxies, black holes, collisional rings, Copula, Cosmic Dawn, cosmological surveys, Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics, Diamond Open Access, Diamond Open Access Publishing, galaxy mergers, Ice, Interstellar Medium, JWST, non-Gaussianity, Open Access, Open Access Publishing., photometry, SEEDZ simulations, SN2025adpq, spectroscopy, Type 1a Supernovae, weak gravitational lensing on June 20, 2026 by telescoper

It’s Saturday again so it’s time for another update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further three papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 126 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 574.

I will continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience); these announcements also show the DOI for each paper.

The first paper to report this week, published on Monday 15th June, is “SN 2025adpq: A Type Ia supernova in a collisional ring formed during a major galaxy merger” by Brendan O’Connor (Carnegie Mellon University, USA) and 18 others based in the USA, Germany and Australia. The study reports the discovery of a Type Ia supernova, SN 2025adpq, within a collisional ring formed by a major galaxy merger., offset from the nucleus of the primary galaxy. It is published in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies.

The overlay for this paper is here

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:

The second paper for this week, published on Tuesday June 16th in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies is “The Colors of Ices: Measuring ice column density through photometry” by Adam Ginsburg (U. Florida, USA) and ten others based in the USA, Germany and Spain. This study demonstrates that JWST photometry can identify and quantify interstellar ices, using new open-source models, interstellar ices, finding significant abundance in non-star-forming gas, suggesting many avenues for further research.

The overlay looks like this:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

The third paper of the week, published on Wednesday 17th June in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics is “The Non-Gaussian Weak-Lensing Likelihood: A Multivariate Copula Construction and Impact on Cosmological Constraints” by Veronika Oehl and Tilman Tröster (both of ETH Zurich, Switzerland). This study presents a framework for computing non-Gaussian likelihoods for correlation functions, particularly useful in large-scale weak-lensing surveys. It suggests Gaussian likelihoods are sufficient for stage-IV surveys.

The overlay for this one is here:

The final, accepted version can be found on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

The fourth and final paper of the week, also ublished on Wednesday 17th June but in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “Black Hole Feedback, Galaxy Quenching and Outflows at Cosmic Dawn: Analysis of the SEEDZ Simulations” by Lewis R. Prole (Maynooth University, Ireland) and 15 others based in Ireland, Germany, USA and UK. The study analyzes the growth and feedback effects of massive black holes in SEEDZ simulations, suggesting that black hole feedback, not nearby supernovae or gas exhaustion, limits initial growth.

The overlay is here:

The final, accepted version can be found on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

And that concludes this week’s update. It has been a slow week on the publishing front, but the main reason is that we have a big backlog of papers accepted but waiting for the authors to put their final versions on arXiv and we can’t do anything about that! I’ll do another update next Saturday.

1 Comment »

Bayesian Inductive Inference and the Anthropic Cosmological Principle

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags Anthropic Cosmological Principle, Antony J.M. Garrett, Bayesian Inductive Inference, Comments on Astrophysics 17(1) 23-47, Gordon and Breach, NASA/ADS, Taylor and Francis on June 17, 2026 by telescoper

Many moons ago I wrote a paper with a person called Anthony J.M. Garrett with the title Bayesian Inductive Inference and the Anthropic Cosmological Principle; the full reference is A.J.M. Garrett and P. Coles, Comments on Astrophysics 17(1) 23-47 (1993). It got a few citations here and there, and has been discussed in a few books and other texts. In 1999, the journal Comments on Astrophysics was merged with some other journals to form Comments on Modern Physics which was then acquired by publishers Taylor and Francis in 2001, when it took over Gordon and Breach. The new publisher never put the old papers online in digital format. Most of the back catalogue of Comments on Astrophysics is indexed in NASA/ADS (bibstem: ComAp), but No. 1 of Volume 17 is not there. That classic paper is not, as far as I know, available anywhere on the internet. Or at least it wasn’t until now.

I was recently asked for a PDF of the paper so I made a scan and sent it. Now that I have a scan, however, and WordPress now has a PDF upload gadget, I thought I’d put it up here. I did a Google search for it earlier this evening and the AI Summary described the paper as “seminal”, which just goes to show that AI isn’t always wrong!

Anyway, here is a scanned PDF of the paper:

Garrett&Coles Download

Apologies that it’s a bit grubby and wonky, but the scan is made from an old photocopy. I did have a proper offprint somewhere, but I can’t find it.

The real reason for doing this post, however, is to use it as a counter-example to something people often bring up when I criticize academic publishers: “..but they curate the literature!”. They don’t, actually. Libraries do that. The Garrett-Coles paper is available as a hard copy in libraries, but the publisher has nothing to do with that!

P.S. I did a blog post a while ago based on part of the paper.

P.P.S. If I get time I’ll contact ADS to see if they want to put this up in the official biblipgraphic collection…

2 Comments »

Euclid Update – Revised Timeline

Posted in Euclid, mathematics, The Universe and Stuff with tags ESA Euclid, ESAC, Euclid Dr1, Euclid DR1 - Foundation, European Space Agency, LE1, LE2, LE3, Quaternions on June 16, 2026 by telescoper

In a post last week I hinted that I hoped soon to be able to provide an update on progress with the European Space Agency’s Euclid Mission. People within the Euclid Consortium have known for some time, but it has now been officially announced by ESA, that the timeline for the first full Data Release (DR1; originally scheduled for October 2026) has now been revised.

The plan now is for DR1 to happen in stages, with a first tranche to occur in November 2026 (precise date yet to be announced). The complete data release will take place in mid-2027 (probably in June). The sky area covered by DR1 will be about covering a large sky area of about 1900 deg².

To give a little more background, the data products from the Euclid survey are divided into three levels of data processing function:

LE1 – the “raw” data frames, prior to calibration, generated at the Science Operations Centre from the time-ordered data and telemetry received from the spacecraft
LE2 – the calibrated and corrected data for the two instruments (VIS and NISP) – images, spectra, catalogues of point sources, etc
LE3 – the high-level data products (galaxy catalogues, cosmic shear maps, etc) designed for cosmological analysis

The first release will comprise LE1 and LE2 only. This will be called DR-Foundation. The LE3 data will be added next year to make the full DR1. Since LE3 is required for the cosmological analysis that is the prime motivation for the Euclid mission, it follows that there will be no official cosmology results from Euclid DR1 until mid-2027 at the earliest. Other results based on “Foundation” data may of course emerge before then.

I hope this clarifies the situation.

P.S. Irish physicists and astronomers will be particularly interested to know that the LE1 data includes information about the spacecraft and instrument pointing orientations, which is stored in the form of quaternions…

1 Comment »

For Retired Engineers…

Posted in Biographical, The Universe and Stuff with tags arXiv:2605.21660, electrical engineers, papers, relativity, unsolicited letters on June 14, 2026 by telescoper

Many moons ago, just before I moved from Cardiff for my stint at Sussex University, I decided to ditch all the unsolicited letters and manuscripts I’ve accumulated over the years about “alternative” theories of relativity, cosmology, and whatnot. I don’t know why I had kept so many of them for so long, but I no longer have most of them. I did keep one or two of the best ones, however. Here’s an example:

I could never make head nor tail of this, but sometimes had a vague feeling that it might just be a sort of cosmic Rosetta Stone, offering up the Secrets of the Universe in diverse languages. Sadly, however, it’s more likely that the languages involved are Balderdash, Gibberish and Gobbledegook. At the time I wrote:

I regret to announce, therefore, that the plethora of papers telling me why Einstein was wrong, how the Universe is really in the shape of a spiral, how the Great Pyramid of Giza explains the Higgs Boson, and why the Big Bang couldn’t have happened, will have to go to the Great Shredder in the Sky (if that’s where it is).

Anyway, to all my correspondents all I can say is that I’ve enjoyed reading your letters – you must be very fond of your old typewriters – and I’m grateful for the time you took to draw the diagrams by hand in so many lovely colours. And I’m impressed by your qualifications as Electrical Engineers. Really. I’m sorry I didn’t reply to you all individually, but I just didn’t have the time. And now it pains me to realise I don’t have the space either…

I still get such things, of course, but they always come by email nowadays and usually end up in the spam folder, where I do not disturb them. I never reply, of course. Life’s too short.

I know I’m not the only one to have noticed the fact that many – indeed most – such correspondents are Electrical Engineers (usually retired). I was delighted therefore to see that there’s now a nice little paper on arXiv by David Garfinkle with the title Relativity for Retired Engineers and the abstract:

We provide some guidance and examples to clear up common misconceptions about special relativity. These misconceptions often come from trying to express the truths of special relativity in Newtonian terms rather than in terms more natural to special relativity itself. This conceptual stance can also help in attaining a better understanding of general relativity.

Readers may consider referring their correspondents to this source…

5 Comments »

In the Dark

Archive for the The Universe and Stuff Category

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics 04/07/2026

Open Journal of Astrophysics

Open Journal of Astrophysics

Open Journal of Astrophysics

Open Journal of Astrophysics

Open Journal of Astrophysics

Open Journal of Astrophysics

Open Journal of Astrophysics

Structures on Gigaparsec Scales?

In a Random Universe…

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics 27/06/2026

Open Journal of Astrophysics

Open Journal of Astrophysics

Open Journal of Astrophysics

Euclid Stares at the Galactic Bulge

Summer Solstice 2026

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics 20/06/2026

Open Journal of Astrophysics

Open Journal of Astrophysics

Open Journal of Astrophysics

Open Journal of Astrophysics

Bayesian Inductive Inference and the Anthropic Cosmological Principle

Euclid Update – Revised Timeline

For Retired Engineers…

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