How Two Guys Working for the Telephone Company Discovered the Origin of the Universe
The story has been told many times. The detector had an annoying and remarkably intransigent “hiss” and Penzias and Wilson knew it was the detector, since the hiss didn’t change as they pointed their antenna at different places in the sky. A radio hiss can be converted into a temperature: a red-hot coal has a temperature of a few thousand degrees Celsius but this hiss was microwave-hot, putting it just a few degrees above absolute zero.
Open Sesame II
So what gives? So far as I can tell, Elsevier hopes to negotiate blanket deals with science funding agencies and consortia of institutions to cover the cost of these journals. And I suspect many scientists will be apprehensive at the thought of Elsevier inserting themselves even more deeply into the world’s scholarly infrastructure.
Beatrice’s Biography
Astrophysicist Beatrice Tinsley (1941-1981) was once a leading candidate for the “Most Important New Zealand Scientist You’ve Never Heard Of Award”, but has been largely eliminated from consideration by a stage play, having a mountain named after her, and a full-length biography.
Odd Odds
But if you think about it, you see a huge number of rare events in a single day — it is just that not all rare events are interesting events.
Open Sesame
more importantly, the Archive has reached the point where it threatens to do to traditional journals what MP3s did to record shops, as it represents a radically new model for scientific publishing. In particle physics and astrophysics, the Archive is essentially complete — I almost never see traditionally published papers that are not also posted to the Archive.
Time Capsule
A year ago, my family and I moved home to New Zealand after 15 years in the United States. We’d left New Zealand with suitcases, but returned with a 40-foot shipping container.A year later we are just getting to the bottom of the last of the boxes, where I discovered a 2001 copy of Pulp — a glossy New Zealand “fashion and lifestyle” magazine — with me in it.