Chris Lintott’s Universe

I’m still in the US, where we’ve been filming pieces for the next few Sky at Nights. I need to write up the amazing two days we spent in mission control for Phoenix, but for now the Discovery blog has details of the Large Binocular Telescope and the alien-hunting Allen Telescope Array.

Having left the Sky at Night team crowing about their upgrade to first class on the way home and have headed off to visit Pamela. I’m giving a public talk tomorrow (Monday) night about Galaxy Zoo and citizen science more generally, and for those who can’t join us we’ll be broadcasting the event online.

The link is here, although you should be able to watch and chat below. The talk starts at 7pm Central, 1am Tuesday morning BST and midnight GMT.

Streaming Video by Ustream.TV

A nice piece of observation in this week’s Science sent me off on a tangent. You can see the results over at the Discovery Blog.

I’m shortly off of my travels again, recording interviews for Sky at Night in California and Arizona. On the way back, I’m visiting Pamela of astronomycast fame to work on a few projects. If anyone lives in or around St Louis, U.S.A., then you might be interested, nay, delighted, to know that you can come and listen to me talk about Galaxy Zoo and related issues on the evening of June 30th. Details are over here - and we’ll try and ustream the talk for those who can’t make it.

With the successful landing of Discovery a few minutes ago, the next mission on the schedule is a trip to the Hubble Space Telescope, a mission which ranks as one of the most ambitious ever planned, and one which I’m extremely excited about.

Welcome home Discovery, and fingers crossed for the crew of Atlantis in October.

My latest post over at the Discovery blog is a report on a very nice piece of work from a team led by people here in Oxford; they’ve detected the very beginning of a supernova explosion.

You can read my thoughts on chasing one of the Netherland’s most famous astronomers around here.

This is a screenshot from NASA TV’s media channel coverage of the GLAST telescope launch. All seems to be going well so far, but commentary is being provided by the chap you can see here, running up and down along the large bank of screens in front of him.

I thought the signature image for any mission’s beginning was ranks of serried mission control types - is spaceflight now so easy one person can monitor everything? Impressive work, whoever he is.

P.S. More on GLAST once it reaches its final orbit.
P.P.S. They’re now showing several mission control type rooms. I’m reassured. This is the telemetry team…

You now don’t have to listen to my attempt to parse Sean Carroll’s talk, but can go and read his take on the research at Cosmic Variance.

In commenting here, Sean said

I was mostly trying to make the point that, although multiverse ideas are very new and underdeveloped, it is certainly imaginable that someday when we understand them better we will be able to make concrete predictions. The new CMB paper is interesting mostly as an investigation into conventional inflation, but there might be some connection to the pre-inflationary universe, which is certainly intriguing. But it’s all quite speculative at this point.

I’d hoped I’d made clear in my piece for the BBC how speculative this was. What made me want to write the story in the first place, though, was exactly what Sean said above - to an outsider to the field the idea that it is even imaginable that we might be able to make concrete predictions from ideas about multiverses which have haunted the pages of New Scientist and its ilk for decades is stunning. That’s what I wanted to get across.

At any conference there’s one talk that changes the way you think about something, or crystalizes thoughts that you’ve had anyway. In the last few months I’d been thinking carefully about the answer to the question ‘but what happened before the Big Bang’, and a talk by Cosmic Variance blogger Sean Carroll crystalized some of those thoughts. He was clear that he was on the edge of speculation at times, but you can read the short version of my thoughts at the BBC website.

I’ll write more about my thoughts here over the weekend, so watch this space.

Update : Woo! Number 1 most emailed article…

I’m delighted to announce that I’ll be writing for Discovery’s new website, over at http://space.discovery.com. There are a couple of articles up already, and I’ll try and post links here when I write. My fellow bloggers, including Jennifer Ouellette of the excellent Cocktail Party Physics are well worth a look too.