Internet Finds of the “Week”

A few quick things from around the internet.

1. Our favourite Welsh astrophysicist and supervisor, Geraint Lewis, has been keeping himself busy. He’s appeared on Wikipedia, and even has his own blog: Cosmic Horizons. And he’s presented a lecture titled “The Life of Galaxies on ABC Radio National as part of their Music and the Cosmos event, which manages the most depressing end to a public lecture ever:

They have fuel in their cores which is slowly being used up, and eventually stars will start to turn off. Once they’ve used up all their fuel, they can’t burn any more, they will turn off, they will become black, they will emit no light. At some point in the very dim and distant future there will be one remaining star in our Milky Way galaxy, and at some point that too will run out of fuel and it will become dark and the Milky Way will enter into a night and the night will go on forever.

Well worth a listen.

2. A set of three excellent lectures on gravitational waves from Kip Thorne were delivered as the Pauli Lectures at ETH. Video and audio are available here. The first lecture was for the general public and shows some wonderful recent simulations of colliding black holes. Later lectures were more technical but no less fascinating. I’d almost forgotten how much I like General Relativity.

3. I was recently sent this and I loved it. From here: Plan of the City is a new animated film, conceived and directed by Joshua Frankel, about the architecture of New York City blasting off into outer space and resettling on Mars. The film’s visuals are an animated collage combining live action footage, animated elements, illustrations and treated photographs, including photos taken by the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity made available to the public domain by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Plan of the City was created in collaboration with composer Judd Greensteinand NOW Ensemble, an acclaimed “indie classical” chamber ensemble; the ensemble, including Greenstein, feature prominently in the film as live actors set inside the animated framework.

4. If you’re a sucker for punishment … I was recently invited to give four lectures on the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life at the St. Thomas Summer Seminar in Philosophy of Religion in Minnesota. The first and second lectures attempt to cover all of modern physics, astrophysics and cosmology in 2 hours, from the structure of atoms and molecules to planet, star and galaxy formation. The third lecture considers what would happen if we changed the laws of nature. In particular, we find that in many cases, the universe would not be able to evolve and sustain complex, intelligent life. The fourth lecture discusses the multiverse – the idea that the universe that we observe is just one of many, each different. I discuss the most popular multiverse today – the inflationary multiverse – and the challenges that the multiverse faces. The talks are on youtube.

5. Aesop himself couldn’t have invented a fable as obvious as this.

6. If you can get a hold of it, Andy Fabian has written an excellent article titled The Impact of Astronomy, which ”assesses the variety and scope of the impact astronomy has on science, technology and society – and why it is so hard to measure”. It describes a number of cases in which astronomy has lead to important advances in other areas, including the development of WiFi and digital cameras.

7. Look at this! And also, a wonderful bit of Fry & Laurie.