A&C reference library

julcab12

(Disable lurker Mode). . Awesome article and thanks for sharing Marcus. I really like his approach and mentality towards science and "how it should be". Really change my view on what is "ugly" or how it's not needed.

"I think science is not about data; it's not about the empirical content, about our vision of the world. It's about overcoming our own ideas, and about going beyond common sense continuously. Science is a continuous challenge of common sense, and the core of science is not certainty, it's continuous uncertainty. I would even say the joy of taking what we think, being aware that in everything we think, there are probably still an enormous amount of prejudices and mistakes, and try to learn to look a little bit larger, knowing that there is always a larger point of view that we'll expect in the future."

marcus

I'm glad you liked it!
I happened to see your response--was it to the article by Bianchi and Rovelli "Why all these prejudices against a constant?" or to the piece in Edge?--because I came here to post this page from Ned Wright's cosmology site:
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/Dltt_is_Dumb.html
He thinks light travel time should not be used in press releases as a measure of distance.
And he gives an argument in support, and proposes making more use of the redshift number.
Proper distance would be another good alternative---what you would measure by any ordinary means (e.g. radar) if you could somehow stop expansion long enough to measure.

marcus

Mordred found a recent paper which gives a detailed treatment of the extent of the Habitable Zone under various conditions---different kinds of planetary atmospheres.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.6674

marcus

Introductory cosmology video lectures on Pirsa.
The lecturer is a young guy named Matt Johnson. I watched Lecture 1 and got a good impression of him. He seems fast, alert to questions, and well-organized. It is blackboard rather than slides, which is normal for these Pirsa introductory lecture series. That doesn't slow him down because he writes quickly and legibly. Click on enlarge, to fill the screen.

These series normally run to something on the order of ten lectures. The first three have already been given and are online. Their URLs are:
http://pirsa.org/13040062/
http://pirsa.org/13040063/
http://pirsa.org/13040064/