Category Archives: Research

Cosmo09 conference

By Ian | Published: September 1, 2009

The annual Cosmo conference for all branches of cosmology is taking place next week 7th-11th September in CERN. I will be attending and giving a talk in the inflation session on Thursday afternoon. After last week’s Science Online London 2009 conference which I attended, I have been thinking about how to get fellow cosmologists to [...]

Also posted in Conferences and Meetings, Cosmology, Tools | Tagged CERN, cosmo09, Cosmology, friendfeed, Inflation, solo09, twitter | Leave a comment

Numerical Calculation of Second Order Perturbations

By Ian | Published: July 23, 2009

My new paper, written with Karim Malik, has just been released into the wild. We show that it is possible to numerically simulate second order perturbations for a single scalar field with a canonical action. I’ve been working on this for a long time and learned a lot about the mechanics of inflation in the [...]

Also posted in arXiv, Cosmology | Tagged arXiv, astronomy, Cosmology, Inflation, numerical, paper, phd, python, Science | Leave a comment

The Big Bang Fair

By Ian | Published: February 6, 2009

The first ever UK Young Scientist and Engineers Fair is taking place in the first week of March. The Big Bang Fair in the QE2 Conference Centre in Westminster will pit hundreds of schoolchildren against each other for the main prizes of UK Young Scientist and UK Young Technologist of the Year. There will also [...]

Also posted in Interesting Things, Outreach | Tagged astronomy, big bang fair, darwin, exhibition, Outreach, school, Science, students | Leave a comment

GradSchool Graduate

By Ian | Published: July 28, 2008

As a graduate student any time taken away from the main task at hand, getting a PhD, can seem like a wasted opportunity. Especially when the time is not actually for a resting holiday in the sun, but is focussed on those hard-to-define transferable skills we are all told to cherish. So, it may come [...]

Also posted in Conferences and Meetings, Tools | Tagged bournemouth, gradschool, interviews, phd, postgrad, skills, time management, transferable skills, ukgrad | Leave a comment

New tools for a new year

By Ian | Published: October 11, 2007

As the new semester is starting in earnest, I think it’s time for me to post the first update for a few months. One of the main differences between post-graduate and under-graduate life is that as postgrads we don’t have a 3 month break over the summer. As seminars finish at the same time as [...]