Andrew H. Jaffe

With some more text…

Checking some infrastructure…

Twenty-five years ago, I moved from San Francisco to the UK, from a fellowship at Berkeley to a permanent job at Imperial College, London.

It’s been exactly two years since the start of our sabbatical year away from England, and almost a year since we returned.

As a scientist in the later stages of my career, the managerial and mentorship load has increased, leaving less time for math and programming.

After living in Japan for about four months, we left in mid-December.

My old friend Marc Weidenbaum, curator and writer of disquiet.com, reminded me, in his latest post, of the value of blogging.

If you’re reading this, then you might realise that I haven’t posted anything substantive here since 2018, commemorating the near-end of the Planck collaboration.

Another aspect of Planck’s legacy bears examining.

This week, we released (most of) the final set of papers from the Planck collaboration — the long-awaited Planck 2018 results (which were originally meant to be the “Planck 2016 results”, but everything takes longer than you hope…), available on the ESA w…

I have the unfortunate duty of using this blog to announce the death a couple of weeks ago of Professor Leon B Lucy, who had been a Visiting Professor working here at Imperial College from 1998.

It was announced this morning that the WMAP team has won the $3 million Breakthrough Prize.

The first direct detection of gravitational waves was announced in February of 2015 by the LIGO team, after decades of planning, building and refining their beautiful experiment.

More technical stuff, but I’m trying to re-train myself to actually write on this blog, so here goes… For no good reason other than it was easy, I have added a JSONfeed to this blog.

This is a technical, nerdy post, mostly so I can find the information if I need it later, but possibly of interest to others using a Mac with the Python programming language, and also since I am looking for excuses to write more here.

[Update: I have fixed some broken links, and modified the discussion of QBism and the recent paper by Chris Fuchs— thanks to Chris himself for taking the time to read and find my mistakes!]

I recently finished my last term lecturing our second-year Quantum Mechanics course, which I taught for five years.

Like everyone else in my bubble, I’ve been angrily obsessing about the outcome of the US Presidential election for the last two weeks.

O Rose thou art sick.

It’s been a year since the last entry here.

In an occasionally thoughtful but mostly silly attempted takedown of the so-called New Atheists (Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and such), philosopher John Gray writes that there is an irresolvable contradiction between viewing religion naturalistically — as a…

[Update: The bug seems fixed in the latest version, 10.0.2.]

Briefly (but not brief enough for a single tweet): I’ll be speaking at Loncon 3, the 72nd World Science Fiction Convention, this weekend (doesn’t that website have a 90s retro feel?).

A quick heads-up on some recent and upcoming events: A couple of weeks ago, I delivered my long-delayed (if not actually long-awaited) inaugural lecture, “The Random Universe“.

As the academic year winds to a close, scientists’ thoughts turn towards all of the warm-weather travel ahead (in order to avoid thinking about exam marking).

[Uh oh, this is sort of disastrously long, practically unedited, and a mixture of tutorial- and expert-level text.

I’m recently back from my mammoth trip through Asia (though in fact I’m up in Edinburgh as I write this, visiting as a fellow of the Higgs Centre For Theoretical Physics).

After a couple of days of lousy weather, the sky cleared up and dried out Wednesday.

I am sitting in the control room of the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT), 14,000 feet up Mauna Kea, on Hawaii’s Big Island.