The Cambridge Cosmology Consequence

Cosmology is a beautiful thing; so is Stephen Hawking. He’s done a lot for cosmology, so much that he has a research centre at Cambridge named after him:

The Stephen Hawking Centre for Theoretical Cosmology.

The good thing about Cambridge is that they have an enormous amount of money. Their total financial endowment is in excess of £4.3 billion! With this money they make pretty websites to exemplify their research and knowledge. The CTC website is a beautiful example of this.

On the CTC website there is the outreach pages, complete with really good explanations and diagrams of all manner of cosmology. The level of content is Bones, but it can also be Skull with a good use of their glossary.

http://www.ctc.cam.ac.uk/footer/glossary.php

Here’s the section headers for the pages:

• The Big Bang
• Galaxies
• The Cosmic Sky
• The Early Universe
• Quantum Origins
• Black Holes

My personal favourite is the early universe section as it has a lot on string theory. However, the big bang section has a really good page called “A History of Ideas”, which gives little summaries of the turning points in cosmology, such as discovering the cosmic microwave background.

http://www.ctc.cam.ac.uk/outreach/origins/big_bang_two.php

It’s actually one of the most pleasing websites to browse that’s on the muon Academy blog. With a bit of digging, you may uncover some decent links too. To finish on, here’s the most amusing graph on the CTC website (if you have an inner child):

The Stephen Hawking CTC Outreach source:
http://www.ctc.cam.ac.uk/outreach/origins_of_the_universe.php

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The Arxiv Repository

The function of a researcher is to write articles for big and expensive journals, such as Physical Review Letters. After this, the institute that paid for the research looks good and their respect goes up (like a gang in GTA). At least, that’s the hope anyway. In reality, the process is best summed up by the Mumford and Sons line: 

“Crawl on my belly ‘til the sun goes down.”

but perhaps that’s only due to my choice of music as I write. Regardless, here’s the main problems:

1. Only people who have access to a paid subscription for the journal, can read the article.
2. The time between submission and publication is far too long - a duration of months.
3. The article may be considered not good enough to be in the journal, by the journal people themselves. (I’ve heard of an article being rejected because “there’s no such unit as a kilo Wu”.)

So here’s the fix, articles are initially submitted to the Cornell University website: ArXiv. There’s a vast amount of physics research on ArXiv (arr-kiv), neatly organised by topic.

Here’s the best features:

1. Everyone can access the research from the website for free.
2. Submission time is essentially instantaneous.
3. Research will be accepted!

Now there are drawbacks to ArXiv. To me, the main drawback is that you have to decide for yourself how reliable an article is. It’s possible that some clown has submitted a load of rubbish. The reason why researchers use ArXiv was mentioned by Brian Greene in his book: The Elegant Universe. Although he didn’t mention ArXiv explicitly, it’s pretty obvious that he was referring to it when he said that it’s the quickest option for distributing his work. (See the Jaw link at the bottom of this page for this article.)

Eventually, the articles usually find their way into one of the big and expensive journals (for the respect). But my own opinion is that the big and expensive journals are like broken crowns. Whereas ArXiv is another road, and you can take that road and you can fuck it all away. 

Actually that last bit was Mumford and Sons again. But ArXiv is relevant to all Skull, Bones and Jaw - all of physics. There is such a variety of papers and it is really worth a look.

Here’s some interesting papers:

Skull level - space travel:

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0509268

Bones level - the new standard model:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.5190

Jaw level - the article by Brian Greene (interestingly you can see that it was shortly resubmitted - as mentioned in the book):

http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9504145

ArXiv:

http://uk.arxiv.org/

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