The Trenches of Discovery

Hello. Our audience here has grown a little over the Planck release period. Welcome to the blog. You might be surprised to learn that there are actually three of us here. The others are James, the biochemist and Michelle the English student/artist/museum curator. Michelle is on sabbatical as she finishes her doctoral thesis, but James is still very much active. In fact, a new post from him should be appearing later today.

I'm guessing that if you arrived over the last few weeks, your primary interest is physics/cosmology/astronomy. One of the main aims of this whole blog was to bring different communities together. So, please engage with all the themes of the blog. I promise you won't be disappointed. Even if you're mostly interested in physics, you should still read James' post later today. In fact, James' posts are still, despite Planck, our most viewed posts (and closest to award winning). I'm not a biochemist and I really enjoy reading them. If you don't understand something he writes, then just ask him to clarify.

In the meantime, feel free to follow the blog through rss, or to like us on facebook, or to follow Michelle or myself on Twitter. You should also check out the other blogs in Collective Marvelling and SciComm.

And, on that note, goodbye a bit from me for now. I'm not as prolific a blogger as it might have seemed these last few weeks. Blogging the Planck conference and results has helped my research by forcing me to concentrate and digest the results, but continuing at this rate any longer, would not. We have each committed to at least one new post every six weeks though, so I will be writing a new post on April 29 at the latest. If you have any preference for the topic of that post, then leave a suggestion in the comments.

And lastly, thanks for all the encouragement and sharing of my posts that has occurred during the conference. Constructive criticism and suggestions for improvement are also welcome. As are rumours and offers of guest-posts from other people involved in fundamental research.

Twitter: @just_shaun