Many congratulations to Adam Christopherson who has been awarded the prestigious Sir Norman Lockyer Fellowship of the Royal Astronomical Society. The three year fellowship is awarded “to enable an outstanding research worker to conduct a self-directed programme of research in any astronomical topic”. Adam joined Queen Mary as a PhD student a year after I did and it’s been great sharing an office with him over the past few years. Although we haven’t yet written a paper together we’ve thrown a lot of ideas around so hopefully we can work together on something soon.

I passed my viva examination a few months ago, and after very helpful suggestions from my two examiners I submitted the final version of my PhD thesis to the QMUL authorities a month ago. The paperwork all went through so I have now completely finished my doctoral training. All that remains to be done is the celebratory donning of a floppy cloth cap and scarlet robes at the graduation ceremony in a few weeks.

Yesterday I gave my first seminar as a postdoc in the regular Relativity and Cosmology series at QMUL. People seemed to engage with the material and there were quite a few questions at the end. The slides for the talk are available as a pdf or through the embedded widget below. My style for talks is heavily skewed towards minimalist slides with lots of verbal explanation so without having me beside you to guide you through them they might be hard to understand.

The Cosmology and Relativity Group in Queen Mary (where I work) have recently opened a new wiki to replace the old group pages which were rarely updated. Only group members are able to add and edit content but hopefully there is some useful information for anyone interested in the group.

So it turns out that I am going to give a talk at UK Cosmo next week. It’s only supposed to be 18 minutes long, which you might imagine wouldn’t be that difficult to put together, but as you can tell from the lack of posts here recently, I’ve been having some problems. The talk is supposed to be based on our last paper (which will soon appear in JCAP by the way), but with limited time I think I will have to speed through it pretty quickly.

Last night’s talks were really interesting and it was good to get three different opinions being discussed in a (semi-)public setting. Usually these sort of lectures are one-sided in their opinions, which tends to hide the fact that the hot topics are also the most controversial. So as I mentioned earlier there were three speakers, Bernard Carr, George Ellis and Paul Davies. On the night Chris Isham was not able to attend, so one of the representatives of the Templeton Foundation acted as chairperson.

Bernard introduced the idea of the multiverse, after having plugged the new book and thanked all the contributors. With only thirty minutes allotted to each speaker there wasn’t enough time for a detailed explanation, but he explained some of the different multiverse ideas, in particular using this picture by Max Tegmark to illustrate the hierarchy of multiverse structures. With time running out (and some quite surprising heckling when he asked for some leeway), Bernard had to race through the history of physics on one slide, imploring us to consider it as “an artistic journey”.

On Thursday evening I am going to the launch of this book, edited by Professor Bernard Carr from QMUL, called “Universe or Multiverse?”. It is a collection of articles about the idea of a multiverse and the prospects (if any) or ever experimentally verifying it. On the night of the launch there are going to be three speakers, Bernard himself, Paul Davies and George Ellis, with Chris Isham chairing. Unfortunately the event is by invitation only and is now fully booked.