Been watching the ESA Planck live press junket George show thingy. Well, everybody and his hairdresser will be writing up their well considered Planck thoughts over the next hour and a half, so I thought I would just summarise some personal lessons. The follow-on press release is here. Apparently there will be more serious stuff about lunchtime, and here in Embra our very own Andrew Liddle will give a seminar this afternoon. Actual science papers on ArXiv tomorrow. Meanwhile, lets keep it light.
The title is ruthlessly stolen from a a Tweet by Professor R.Ivison.
(1) George’s taste in ties continues to improve.
(2) George would give his children away for the Planck map. According to their Mum, they didn’t hear this because they are in school.
(3) The Universe is a bit like a grapefruit. Roundish, mostly very smooth, but with tinnsy-winnsy dimples
(4) When a Twitter hashtag starts trending, it becomes cloggged up with porno-tweets. This is annoying. Well, unless thats what you are after of course. (Am I missing some kind of filter?)
(5) You can’t mention God, unless you mention that you are not mentioning Him. Her. It.
(6) The Universe is EVEN MORE BORING than WMAP told us. Perfect fit to simple inflation.
(7) EXCEPT … for (a) the ten degree dip, and (b) the preferred direction, aka the axis of evil
(8) The axis of evil lines up with the ecliptic plane. Woahh ! But as ex-Edinbuggerer Tom Kitching said to me, that sounds like zodiacal dust… so maybe when that correction is improved the UNIVERSE IS EVEN MORE BORING
(9) The Hubble constant is exactly what Michael Rowan-Robinson told us years ago (67) without the aid of extreme coolants
(10) Talking of which, ESA say they created the coldest place in space, at 0.1K. Now that is definitely quite cute.
