Science and productivity by Dr. Christine Corbett Moran
There is both room for and a need for many different types of physicists and scientists to kick progress up a notch. Some of the most mind-stretching and inspiring are those who are philosophical about their work, as well as those who are interdisciplinary in their understanding. Scott Aaronson fits in both camps and shares Read More …
June 1, 2015 I was thrilled to start my 3 year tenure as an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow (NSF AAPF) at Caltech. I am therefore declaring June 1 as my official academic New Year. I’m treating this fellowship period as my shot to make a scientific difference, and here’s to the next 3 years. I have an structured routine scheduled, Read More …
I’ve been using Macs all my computing life, and relied heavily on headless Linux boxes for most of my computing career (I must also admit to two stints as a Windows user, during internships at FAST Search&Transfer and SpaceX respectively). Besides a small Linux laptop, which I got as a failed experiment, I’ve never before Read More …
I spent my Fall as an intern in propulsion analysis at SpaceX. I had unparalleled mentors in rocketry, computational physics and software engineering. The intern program is top-notch, and to me represented the most effective “in” to the notoriously selective and demanding company. Moreover, the internship duration was a perfect interlude in my academic career. Read More …
To start with some bonus material, the featured image of the post is from Einstein’s notebook during the period during which he was developing general relativity. This post is a continuation series of posts goes through the elements of the concordance cosmology: general relativity, inflation, the Big Bang and the expansion of the universe, cold dark matter (CDM) and a Read More …
This series of posts goes through the elements of the concordance cosmology: general relativity, inflation, the Big Bang and the expansion of the universe, cold dark matter (CDM) and a positive cosmological constant. I will start with a review of the historical, theoretical, and observational advances that led to each model’s widespread acceptance. The posts are excerpts from my Ph.D. thesis, lightly modified for blog format. No mathematical equations are written, with the intent of making the introductory material accessible to the non-specialist. A full bibliography of references in posts in this series is available. Read More …
Gravitational lensing results from the fact that General Relativity describes our universe: mass bends light and can function in effect like a lens, bending light in ways that can be used to infer the mass distribution itself. Gravitational microlensing is due to this same effect, but refers to the detection of objects which are of Read More …
Here’s a video introduction to the Game of Life Historically, one of the pioneers of computer science John von Neumann was interested in finding machines which could reproduce themselves. He developed an abstraction allowing him to mathematically model his work on a computational grid. A mathematician John Conway took up and simplified his work publishing Read More …
This is a review of the recent paper, to be published in Nature, by Andrew Potzen and Fabio Governato Cold dark matter heats up. The paper is itself a review, containing information published in previous studies. I gave a presentation about it at our weekly Astrophysics journal club. The figure in the header is M82, Read More …
I fully admit to being an information and interaction junky. I feed on bits and pats on the backs to the point of bloating, and with my schedule when I’m working I need to be on point. I try to take a media fast once a year for about a month for a personal cleanse, Read More …