[Still (mostly) on vacation.]
In what research time I have found in the last few weeks, I have mainly worked on some long-term writing projects, one of which is about the empirical basis of astronomy and cosmology. This is an interesting subject, because the data are so indirect (photons only), from objects that are so remote, in a context where there is no experimental activity, only passive observation. Not entirely research, but not irrelevant either.
I'd be really interested in hearing more about your thoughts on this. I was in grad school at Columbia for a couple of semesters doing Astrophysics. Now I'm working in the STM industry mainly running software projects, but I still have quite an interest in science.
ReplyDeleteCosmology spooked me for a couple of reasons. One is the scale involved. Something I think too few people spend time thinking about.
The other was the tenuousness of the signals that we deal with, a few photons registering their interactions in a piece of gallium arsenide. The Cherenkov tracks of decaying particles, only visible through a faint blue halo, and so on.
To have grasped such thin threads and woven a deep and fascinating picture of the universe is wonderful thing, and I'd be very interested in seeing what your thoughts on this are.