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Rob Knop's Blog -- ramblings and rants about astronomy, cosmology, science education, general nerdism, and anything else.
Rob Knop earned a PhD in Physics from Caltech in 1997, and did a 5-year post-doc with the Supernova Cosmology Project, and contributed to the discovery of the accelerating Universe. He was an assistant professor of Physics & Astronomy at Vanderbilt for 6 years before scattering out of academia. He now works for Linden Lab, the producers of Second LIfe. (Note: this is not an official site of Linden Lab! Although I work for Linden Lab, all content in this blog is posted without the review or approval of Linden Lab. All statements and opinions expressed here are my own.)
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Category: Big Bang & Cosmology
An article from New Scientist suggests that we are shortening the life of the Universe by looking at it. To which I say "foo"— primarily to the New Scientist article, not quite so much to the scientific paper behind it. (I do not leave it completely off the hook, however.)
Posted by Rob Knop at 11:16 AM • 4 Comments •
Category: Big Bang & Cosmology
Every so often you will come across somebody who has a "killer" list of "problems" with the Big Bang. While there remain unknowns and questions about the Big Bang— just as there do with biological evolution— the basic picture of...
Posted by Rob Knop at 11:34 PM • 8 Comments •
Category: Big Bang & Cosmology
Hello from England! Last night was the award ceremony for the 2007 Gruber Prizer in Cosmology. It was good to meet up with the members of the SCP again, many of whom I haven't seen in several years. Picture below...
Posted by Rob Knop at 10:50 AM • 2 Comments •
Category: Big Bang & Cosmology
Following the talk I gave in Second Life about the discovery of the accelerating Universe, we held a couple of Q&A sessions. The original plan was to have questions right after the talk, but the Second Life main grid crashed...
Posted by Rob Knop at 10:32 PM • 2 Comments •
Category: Big Bang & Cosmology
I managed to get through my 15-20 minute "talk," and just as I threw it open for questions Second Life had a database problem and everbody in-world had to be logged out.... We got back in 40 minutes or so...
Posted by Rob Knop at 3:39 PM • 4 Comments •
Category: Second Life
Just a reminder: I'm giving a talk / Q&A session about the discovery of the accelerating Universe today in Second Life. The talk is at 10:00 AM PDT / 12:00 Noon CDT / 1:00 PM EDT / 17:00 UT. Find...
Posted by Rob Knop at 10:05 AM • 2 Comments •
Category: Second Life
Next Tuesday, July 31, at 10:00AM PDT (17:00 UT), I'll be giving a talk and Q&A session in Second Life about the discovery of the accelerating Universe. The talk is being hosted by Troy McLuhan of the Science Center Group....
Posted by Rob Knop at 3:37 PM • 8 Comments •
Category: Astronomy Science
This is really cool. Several years ago, the Gruber Foundation established a prize in cosmology. Last year (2006) the award went to John Mather and the COBE team; you may recall that Mather was one of the two winners of...
Posted by Rob Knop at 9:00 AM • 18 Comments •
Category: Big Bang & Cosmology
There's been a revolution in cosmology in the last 10 years. Alas, many of the popularizations and textbooks are taking time to catch up... mostly because they were published more than 10 years ago, I suppose. As such, there's this...
Posted by Rob Knop at 6:00 PM • 42 Comments •
