Preliminary: Cosmological impacts of BICEP2 + Planck

If anybody is interested, I'm currently drip-tweeting some of the constraints one can obtain from considering Planck and BICEP2 data together. BICEP2 did do a bit of this in their paper, but they only considered specific scenarios. They were also often a bit coy about the implications of the combined analysis. I'll try not to be ;-).

The results should only be seen as indicative, these aren't published, and never will be in this form (maybe they could be cited if used in a paper though!). They were provided to me by Sussex Uni's resident obtaining-cosmology-from-the-CMB expert Antony Lewis, after a hurried Tuesday adding the BICEP2 data to the Planck cosmology pipeline (i.e. CosmoMC) and may contain mistakes.

Antony has himself also made some of these results public at the Cosmo Coffee website.

Questions here, or on Twitter are most welcome. If you want to see specific cosmologies, I'll do my best to show them (if I have them), or ask Antony very nicely to provide them (no guarantees, of course).

You can find my Twitter account here: @just_shaun. Feel free to share!

The business of ignorance

Those of you who read this blog regularly may well be waiting on a post on the latest developments in stem cell therapy that I promised recently. I want to reassure you that this is coming, don't fret! However, a story has come to my attention of late that made me reconsider the topic of this post. The story has shocked, saddened, and angered me in equal measure and I felt that it needed sharing with you, dear reader, as it is a prime example of why the public engagement of science is a vitally important task. Given Shaun's heroic efforts last month to bring us the news from the latest  Cosmological Perturbations post-Planck conference, I thought it was fitting to exemplify just why this kind of science reporting is important.

I was first made aware of the story that shocked me so much by an excellent Panorama documentary that aired last month (UK readers can still watch the show online here). For those non-Brits amongst you, Panorama is a highly respected investigative documentary show produced by the BBC, not the kind of programme that bothers with unimportant issues. You can imagine, therefore, that my interest was piqued by the title "Cancer: hope for sale?". I had expected perhaps an exposé on some counterfeit medication ring, or maybe a look at a big pharmaceutical company pushing drugs through ahead of time in countries with lax regulation laws. I could not in my wildest dreams have imagined just how scandalous the actual story turned out to be, nor could I believe that this was the first I was hearing about it.

The main protagonist of this story is a Polish doctor called Stanislaw Burzynski - I had never heard of him before last week but he may be more familiar to those of you from the States. Dr Burzynski has been running a clinic out of Houston, Texas for over 30 years that offers treatment to cancer sufferers and has had thousands of patients through its doors. Burzynski's treatment is based on the notion that there exists a group of peptides (very short proteins) that exist within our bodies and have an immunoprotective effect against the development of cancer and other diseases, which he has given the reassuringly scientific-sounding name 'antineoplastons'. Cancer sufferers, it is claimed, can be treated by oral and intravenous administration of cocktails of various antineoplastons alongside a number of other components of the medication, such as steroids and anti-inflammatories. The antineoplastons used at the Burzynski clinic used to be purified from human urine but are now artificially synthesised from basic chemicals, and, it is claimed, are little short of a miracle weapon in the fight against cancer. The Burzynski clinic proudly asserts that not only do antineoplastons boost the immune response against cancer, but that the correct combination of antineoplastons can be used to generate therapies targeted against specific genes involved in different cancers and so allow for effective, personalised treatment.

This is close enough to real science to sound fairly convincing to the non-specialist. Some peptides are well known to have roles within the immune system (defensins, for example), and gene-targetted therapies represent a huge and promising area of oncology research. It all sounds pretty technical and reassuringly complex. That is enough for desperate individuals looking to cure themselves or loved ones when all else has failed; they're on the first plane to Texas.

The phenomenology of a fourth spatial dimension.

A hyperdimensional cube, known as a tesseract...

Part of the motivation for this blog was to open up a dialogue between working artists and working scientists. One of the conversations that is starting to develop relates to the (artistic) field of phenomenology and whether it does/doesn't have anything to say when it comes to the more abstruse sciences. Of course phenomenology is the study of the things humans experience (at least according to my rudimentary understanding of it) and scientists are human beings who experience abstruse science so phenomenology must have something to say about science, by definition. But what?

The discussions which began this conversation concerned two online applications that aid in the visualisation of the scales involved in time and space. See this post and this post and the comments in each for a discussion of the apps. In that discussion and in the comments to a later post I expressed a sense of disappointment in what these apps were managing to express. I should clarify that I think the apps are great and interesting, but if one is looking for a phenomenology of science I don't think this is where the most interesting phenomenology is (of course the app creators aren't looking for a phenomenology of science, so they are completely forgiven). The scale of space and time are very ordinary, everyday, Earthly things. The most interesting discoveries science has made, at least in the world of high energy physics, are not well described in such terms - this is almost precisely what makes them so interesting.

As Rhys pointed out in one of those comment threads a huge part of this problem is that many of these discoveries rely heavily on mathematics. And, to a very large degree, to understand the discoveries, you need to have a grasp of the maths. The fact that the very abstract structures and symmetries and patterns that lie hidden in the mathematics are then actually exhibited in the real universe is one of the more wonderful things experienced by a scientist. And that is not easily captured simply through pictures, videos and sounds (or even smells) of the universe.

However, I came across an app today that really does try to bridge this gap. If someone were to be looking for a true phenomenology of the more interesting and wonder inducing aspects of theoretical physics then this is the sort of thing one should be looking for. It is an app that simulates a hyper-dimensional cube. OK, so what on Earth does that mean?

Well, a dot exists in zero dimensions, it has no length, width, nothing. A line exists in one dimension, it has simply a length. A square exists in two dimensions, it has a length and a width. Next, a cube, exists in three dimensions, it has a length, a width and a depth. Now, just imagine there was a fourth spatial dimension. Mathematically this is an easy thing to write down. Then, just as one can form a cube by extending a square into a third dimension, one can form something known as a tesseract by extending a cube into a fourth spatial dimension.

Now, we creatures who exist in just three spatial dimension can't visualise a fourth spatial dimension (I certainly can't). But, just as we can look at a two dimensional surface (a TV screen) and see a projection of a three dimensional object, so can we do the same for an imagined four dimensional object projected onto three (or two) dimensions. And this is precisely what this app does for a four dimensional tesseract. [Edit: Or, as Rhys said in this comment "it shows what a 4D painter would paint on a 3D canvas..."]. And the brilliance is that the app even allows you to manipulate the tesseract, to move it, to spin it (in any of the four dimensions) and while manipulating it you see how that three dimensional projection changes on your two dimensional screen. Here's a video preview...

This app came to my attention as a consequence of minutephysics covering extra spatial dimensions in his latest video - which you should watch for a quick overview of higher dimension. There is even, apparently, a game in construction that requires you to move into and around a fourth spatial dimension to solve puzzles (for example using it to navigate one's way around obstacles and put keys into locks).

I actually think that a phenomenology of abstruse science can go even further and get even more interesting than this. A fourth spatial dimension is one of the simplest ideas I can think of that is not directly understandable from an Earthly perspective, but easily described by maths. It also has the unfortunate position of quite possibly not actually being reality and certainly not yet being testably true reality. However, it is here, with this sort of application/idea that I would think a phenomenology of the interesting bits of high energy physics should start.

Twitter: @just_shaun

The ISW mystery I: Introduction

Looks nice Roger, but what are the industrial applications?

Making science a spectator sport

A huge part of the motivation for us starting this blog, if not the main motivation was to present new research as it is being done. In other words, to present the view of new research from the very trenches where the discoveries are made. I still intend (at some point in that mythical, utopian, land called later) to write a more thorough “motivation for the blog” post; however, the main motivation for presenting new research now, rather than waiting for Brian Cox to make a documentary about it, is this: it allows everyone in society to feel involved in scientific research. The hope is that science will then go beyond being just what those guys with beards in white coats do that we, everyone else, don't understand and instead becomes something that society as a whole gets behind and becomes fascinated by and talks about excitedly during their lunch-break.

You might think this is over-ambitious (though possibly not if you're reading this blog). But, meh, I think you are wrong. The public response to scientific discoveries/announcements last year like this and this tells me that people do care and are immensely fascinated by what scientists do. If society is not talking about science at the water-cooler it is because we, the scientists, are not collectively trying hard enough to involve society in science. There are numerous hard working and successful exceptions of course. The fact that they are exceptions is the problem.

Some scientists reading this might wonder why we even want society talking about science at the water-cooler. Mightn't science become corrupted by such base chatter? Think about this again the next time you are applying for some grant money and have to bend over backwards trying to come up with possible industrial applications for your work. Especially when later that evening you could watch a sportsman get paid millions for doing what he or she chooses to do. I doubt Nike have ever asked Roger Federer to come up with potential industrial applications for his backhand. Sportsmen are paid simply because people like watching them play and think they are cool. But people also want to keep track of scientific progress and they definitely also think it is cool. This latent popularity isn't a bad thing and it isn't being utilised enough by science.

In this sense this blog, and others like it, could be described as attempts by scientists to start making science a spectator sport. Hopefully we'll get better with time.

So, with that unnecessarily long introduction out of the way, let me finally (from the perspective of both this post and the blog itself) start telling you about some of my own research...

Three Impossible Images

1.

Marianne Moore, A Jellyfish (1959)

Of course this first one isn’t even an image, but a poem—a lyric. In this digital audio file at the SFMA Poetry Center you can hear Marianne Moore reading it. Listening to this clip is lovely, because it gives you a sense of the witty, self-depreciating charm of the personality behind the language.

If this poem is an ‘image,’ it is a drama of the almost-visible, starring a jellyfish. Quite a specific, individual jellyfish, swimming around as they do, and momentarily caught in a small poetic narrative. It is the jellyfish that is both visible and invisible: fluctuating, transparent, ethereal, sometimes translucent and sometimes highly colored, jewel-toned, gem-like, strangely compelling, very beautiful, intensely desirable, and alive.

The first lines of the poem contain so much all-over movement that you sense the liquidity before articulating it. Yet when the “arm/ approaches” everything changes. Suddenly it hits you that there’s no glass barrier, an aquarium or a zoo, to separate the person from the jellyfish, so that that this might actually be an eco-drama: a story of ecological ethics in which the arm is in the ocean with the jellyfish.

And this realization introduces two important other movements. When the arm drops back it registers fear, but also something else. “Abandon[ing] your intent” isn't exactly giving up. There’s a hint of purposeful letting go: a deliberate act of relinquishment, or an instinctive reaction to the liveness of the jellyfish’s quiver.

This poem is a kind of motionless animation. It is a drama in which what is not visible becomes more practically significant than we can see, so that a very attractive ‘thing’ is not removed from its environment.

Greater than the sum of our parts

It sounds cheesy (and it is), but as a child I would often wonder at the nature of life, how our bodies function and heal, how we can be living things composed entirely of non-living things, and how we figure in the wider setting of life on Earth. As an adult, I was fortunate enough to get the chance to answer many of my childhood questions through my undergraduate studies and subsequent front-line postgraduate research. I found, however, that far from satisfying my curiosity, my questions simply now contain more acronyms of which most people outside the field wouldn’t be aware! It seems that we never stop being inquisitive and hungry for new understanding. It is the insatiable curiosity of our species that has got us where we are today and will be what builds our futures for (hopefully) a very long time to come. My curiosity for subjects of which I know little is as keen now as it was when I was younger and I relish any chance to learn something novel and interesting. It is my hope that through this blog I will be able to give you some insight into the current state and ongoing work of biochemistry, molecular biology and genetics and so answer some of the questions that might be in that inquisitive part of your mind that we all share.

In a real sense, these three fields are just part of the vast spectrum of natural sciences, but conventionally biochemistry focuses on the structure, function and chemistry of biomolecules; molecular biology deals with how these molecules are organised within living cells and how they interact with one another to achieve specific goals; and genetics describes how the regulation of these biomolecules by DNA and other genetic material translates into organism-scale effects. The boundaries between these areas are extremely grey and there are also many other subgroups along the way, such as cell biology or biophysics.

I am a biochemist by training and now work in the field of molecular biology. Biochemistry and molecular biology are profound testaments to the power of collaborative research. 150 years ago we had essentially no significant comprehension of even the most basic molecular processes of life; chemistry and biology stood completely apart and were very seldom combined. It was in the mid-19^th century that early pioneers began to address the lack of understanding of the chemistry of living organisms, primarily looking at readily available biological fluids, such as blood, urine and bile. Haemoglobin was initially isolated in 1840 by exploiting the increasing sophistication of chemical techniques, becoming the first example of protein purification. However, simply purifying a biological molecule is not enough, one must determine its function, and it is in this endeavour that chemistry and biology truly combine. In the case of haemoglobin, this really began when its ability to bind oxygen was indentified by Felix Hoppe-Seyler 15 years after its original purification. The combination of chemical techniques and biological context and understanding had produced a fascinating new insight into how we and other organisms function at the molecular level and the field hasn’t looked back since! In the relatively short period of time since those early experiments the fields of molecular biology and biochemistry have exploded to become huge enterprises that encompass an enormous amount of work being conducted across the entire planet.

It has always been an important aspect of investigations into molecular biological processes that expertise and technologies from various fields have contributed to the researcher’s arsenal. Many of the most famous successes in the advancement of our understanding of biology have come from extremely collaborative approaches. The discovery of the DNA double-helix, for example, would have been impossible without the chemical expertise to generate and handle organic crystals, knowledge of physics allowing the generation of high-energy X-rays, the mathematical understanding to explain complex X-ray diffraction, the engineering capability to construct extremely finely-manoeuvrable instruments, or the biological understanding of the role and importance of DNA in the regulation of biology. This collaborative work contributed hugely to the establishment of the central dogma of molecular biology and brought the field of genetics into existence. As our understanding has increased, molecular biology has incorporated apparently more distant aspects of other sciences into its own. Our understanding of energy conversion within living cells would be impossible without the wave-particle duality description of electrons as provided by quantum mechanics; whilst many aspects of molecular immunology are dependent on observations of the organism as a whole. In many ways, attempting to pigeon-hole scientific endeavours is pointless as very little of science is pure any more and certainly the field of molecular biology never has been.

So, where next? As the boundaries of classically-defined sciences become less and less relevant we must look to expand our collaborations with ever broader and more eclectic areas of knowledge. The distinction between what is traditionally defined as ‘art’ or ‘science’ is also beginning to blur; leaving us instead with an enormous spectrum of ‘knowledge’ or, perhaps more accurately, ‘philosophy’. It is only in the last few centuries that the term ‘science’ has replaced ‘philosophy’ as it became more necessary to distinguish between physical and theoretical research. However, as these distinctions become less relevant and, one could argue, a hindrance to research and creativity, is it more appropriate to describe all of what we know and have created under a single banner such as ‘philosophy’? The intentions of this blog and other similarly-minded ventures are to help to increase the cross-talk and sharing of knowledge between previously distinct spheres of research and to open up all creative and scientific endeavours to everyone such that we can all have a sense of ownership over them. As far as my contribution goes, I will attempt to share my wonder at the impossibly intricate and complex interactions and reactions that make up everything we are. I hope that you will learn things that you did not know and will find them interesting, and that you get a sense of what we do and do not know and how we are trying to fill in the blanks. I’m certainly looking forward to understanding more about cosmology, the aesthetic, and whatever other topics arise as we go forward! As Michelle discussed in her previous entry, curiosity and wonder are magnificent motivators and concentrators of human energy, and we hope here to excite curiosity in a wider audience and for a more diverse range of topics. With any luck, it will be a small contribution towards focussing the efforts of humanity towards a singular purpose of discovery and creativity.

Wonder

One of the later Platonic dialogues contains an exchange between Socrates and a contemplative youth named Theatetetus, who admits to an occasional sense of overwhelming confusion at the messiness of the world. “I wonder exceedingly as to why in the world these things are,” he says, “and sometimes in looking at them I truly get dizzy.” Socrates responds to this description of the contradictions “that fight against themselves in our soul” with this remark:

I see, my dear Theaetetus, that Theodorus had a true insight into your nature when he said that you were a philosopher, for wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.

The Platonic dialogues were written in vernacular language and intended for a non-specialist audience. They are books about experience that activate the old Latin sense of vulgate as a specialist text that has been translated into the common tongue and put into general circulation—a clarification of the original, yet one that does not seek to reduce its complexity or meaning.

A grounding motivation for this blog is the uniting perception that there are few active vernaculars between contemporary domains of specialist research. You might be legitimately un-surprised to hear that the study of culture—aesthetics, art history, literary studies—doesn't speak much to the hard sciences—cosmology, biochemistry, computational engineering. But these divisions, and the frustrating incommunicability that comes with them, are pervasive: film scholarship doesn't speak enough to poetry, musicology, or the history of science, while the study of the literary Middle Ages might not have enough to say to a history of Enlightenment political novel. As a humanistic scholar of a contemporary period, I will probably never teach Shakespeare.

But a concern with communication isn’t exactly new, even in living memory. Some of the most compelling poetry of the American twentieth century took this problem seriously enough to make comprehensibility its motivating question. “What common language to unravel?” asks William Carlos Williams, thinking of language as the basis for community. Marianne Moore, one of my favorite poets, summarizes the social necessary of building paths of access with the concisely caustic reminder that “we do not admire what we cannot understand.”

Specialist knowledge that neglects to nurture a vocabulary to transmit what it does in comprehensible ways makes itself vulnerable on a number of levels, particularly to the specters of obsolescence and utilitarianism. And too much hermeticism can cut off the routes by which non-specialists might encounter the processes and outcomes of specialized research with the openness and many pleasures of discovery.

Yet few people speak jargonistic lingo out of a desire to be cryptic. Work in the trenches and on the ground has to be efficient, and keyword shorthands are also enablers of communication, through a kind of quick-fire sign language between participants in a field. So the question of accessibility doesn’t have an easy or a self-evident solution—indeed, even broaching the problem of access requires first acknowledging that the very desire to speak across and beyond disciplines challenges a by-now centuries old separation of research domains.

Most importantly, "inter"disciplinarity can’t imply simply a facile gesture at dissolving the disciplinary specificity that gives our work context. It might even require an initial hardening of those differences in order to clarify what boundaries, exactly, are being traversed. How precisely do the words ‘time’ and ‘life’ resonate differently between cosmology, biology, and aesthetics? What is the status and value of ‘contingency’ in each of these fields? In light of the above, are there justifications for keeping things separated out?

Circling around these questions returns me wonder. Socrates’ response to Theatetetus is powerful because it is truly pedagogical. He validates the confusion of a questioning, striving mind as an authentic and necessary grappling with difficulty. And he acknowledges that wonder, while a conscious and cognized reaction, is often expressed in muteness and inarticulateness. At the same time he calls it a “feeling”—a gripping emotion whose very nature is to be at once virtually incommunicable and profoundly readable. To turn to Shakespearean eloquence, “there was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture.”

Wonder is an emotion grounded in a condition of receptivity: in the sense of amazement that can hit you in an encounter with beauty, skill, or a fundamental mystery—regeneration, birth, creativity, persistence. Its ineloquence does not imply passivity, but quite the opposite: wonder is a motivating feeling that impels action, movement, and research, because it lights a person up with restlessness and curiosity. In the oddest of ways, wonder unites art and science in a shared contemplation of nature.

And this pragmatic value of curiosity has been described, with a certain eloquence—by another philosopher who turned his gaze to practical problems of living—as an issue for our contemporaneity:

I don’t subscribe to the idea that there is a decadence, of a lack of writers, of the sterility of thought, of a gloomy future lacking in prospects.

On the contrary, I believe that there is a plethora. What we are suffering from is not a void but inadequate means for thinking about everything that is happening. There is an overabundance of things to be known: fundamental, terrible, wonderful, funny, insignificant, and crucial at the same time. And there is an enormous curiosity, a need, a desire to know. […]

Curiosity is a vice that has been stigmatized in turn by Christianity, by philosophy, and even by a certain conception of science. Curiosity is seen as futility. However, I like the word; it suggests something quite different to me. It evokes "care"; it evokes the care one takes of what exists and what might exist; a sharpened sense of reality, but one that is never immobilized before it; a readiness to find what surrounds us strange and odd; a certain determination to throw off familiar ways of thought and to look at the same things in a different way; a passion for seizing what is happening now and what is disappearing; a lack of respect for the traditional hierarchies of what is important and fundamental.

I dream of a new age of curiosity. We have the technical means; the desire is there; there is an infinity of things to know; the people capable of doing such work exist. So what is our problem? Too little: channels of communication that are too narrow, almost monopolistic, inadequate. We mustn’t adopt a protectionist attitude, to stop “bad” information from invading and stifling the “good.” Rather, we must increase the possibility for movement backward and forward. This would not lead, as people often fear, to uniformity and leveling-down, but, on the contrary, to the simultaneous existence and differentiation of those various networks.

(Michael Foucault, "The Masked Philosopher," in Ethics, alt. translation here)

Foucault seems to describe abundance and narrowness as potentially connected—as no more that two sides of the same coin, perhaps differentiated only by your point of view. And he makes an un-romantically optimistic claim for the future with the quite simple injunction to do something.

While I don’t know exactly what will come from this blog it does represent a hope for dialogue. I’ve recently become interested in the new common grounds between once distinct fields created by the pervasion of new media, and I'll explore some of that here. I’ll describe art and scholarship I’m mulling over, and will adjust my topics in response to both James and Shaun. And perhaps over time all this will include many more points of disciplinary and practical reference, because of the geographically unconstrained sphere of address made possible by the simple fact of cyberspace.

The London riots

The London riots have reminded me why I helped create and now contribute to this blog. They also motivated me to write the following.

There are people in society doing incredible things. Right now, in Geneva, there is a physics experiment going on (the LHC at CERN) that is so incredible that physicists all around the world will stop whatever they are doing at the merest hint of a rumour from the scientists involved. At the LHC they are literally looking for completely new types of matter. And not just types of matter that aren't here to play with on Earth, or the solar system, but types of matter that are not present as stable particles anywhere in the observable universe. Also, at the moment, in an orbit around Earth, there is a satellite that is measuring the light that lingers in the universe from the end of the big bang. This light has existed, travelling freely, for 14 billion years and it is not a stretch of the truth to say that it really is a photograph of the big bang. This is incredible and it is, right now, being done by humanity.

A huge proportion of society, will, on the occasional, dark, starry, night look at the stars and feel a sense of wonder – so they do care. However, most people don't feel any sense of participation in this incredible stuff humanity is doing. They might know of the LHC and CERN, but they feel so infinitely detached from it that they certainly won't relate to it. But, ultimately, these experiments are an undertaking by all of Europe. The scientists might be doing the hard labour, but the capital was provided by the European taxpayer. These are the public's experiments as much as they are the scientists' experiments.

The people rioting in London are no exception. They will care too. But all they can see is a society where the purpose is to accumulate wealth. What a crappy society that looks like. Until you start a family, where's the point, the purpose, the thing in life worth caring about? Why not riot? At least it gets you in the news.

While it isn't true that if everyone in London knew about the LHC that the riots wouldn't have occurred I do believe that if people cared about the goals of their society and saw them as something to fight for that the probability of stuff like this happening would diminish, whatever the other circumstances.

So, I see this blog as a small scale skirmish in that fight. That is, the fight that first aims to make society fully aware of how incredible it actually is, and secondly aims to make society want to contribute to doing more of this incredible stuff.

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Introduction

What is the point of this place?

We've decided to make this blog to give us a place to try to make fundamental research more understandable. In principle, we're interested in all the attempts humanity has made to study where we are, what makes life work, what the full breadth of human experience is, or any other similar natured question - as well as any attempt someone has made to express or reveal the human experience in a new way. We're interested in any endeavour which seeks to understand or express something without (necessarily) seeking a possible application. This research lives and dies on how interesting it is to the public and the first step in making something interesting is making it understandable.

In practice, for now, there are only three of us. So at the moment, fundamental research means Cosmology (me), Biochemistry (James) and Art/Criticism (Michelle). However, we also welcome guest posts on any relevant topic, including other people's perspectives on our own fields.

A secondary (but perhaps more interesting) goal we have is exploring what forms a conversation about these things will take when it is between people from such different specialisations. How are the same words used differently (e.g. time, space, life, death)? What parts of one world view does knowledge from another field illuminate or put into question? What perspectives are common or uncommon?

Why read it?

In a world that already includes many great popular science books, documentaries and blogs, what is it that we could possibly hope to add? More pertinently, why should you, a free and prosperous citizen of the internet, read our blog?

Firstly, although there are already many great communicators of research out there, there is also so much interesting research out there that a lot of it is inevitably left unspoken. Everyone contributing here is a student or a postdoc. And, at least in scientific research, the students and postdocs are the foot soldiers - few discoveries are made without at least one of us, down in the trenches, taking the measurements, doing the calculations, or analysing the data. Look on this blog as a step towards that same group of people becoming the foot soldiers when it comes to communicating research too. We love what we do, hopefully here we can give you a sense of the wonder and beauty that we experience down in those research trenches.

As I've mentioned above, none of us are specialists in each other's work. I am not aware of many situations where people from different, highly specialised, research fields have chosen to have a public discussion of each other's work. If you've ever wondered what a life scientist thinks of art, or a natural scientist thinks about life science, or any other permutation of the three, hopefully here you will find out.

If all other good that might come of this place fails, there is the practice we get in writing. The more feedback we get, the more we will improve. So, you reading, helps us. If you have questions, ask them. If you have ideas, express them. If you have criticisms, give them. We would rather write about a topic knowing that somebody is curious about it, than just because we think it is interesting.

What will be in it?

For now, each one of us has committed to writing something new at least every six weeks. This corresponds to new content on the blog at least every two weeks. We will also add content between these dates (including guest posts), but as a bare minimum we will add content on these days. At least to start with, I will be discussing the state of cosmology in general, my own papers and any interesting discoveries that are made in any fields I feel knowledgeable enough to speak on. Hopefully as things develop I will also be responding to questions asked by James and Michelle (or any other readers). I will also be influenced by their choices of topics and might try to provide my field's perspective on issues they raise.

If you have any insight from your own field of experience please join in the discussion, especially if you disagree with something we write, or have an interesting observation. We very much welcome guest posts too, so if you have anything particularly interesting to discuss, or just want to write something about your own field of work, please email one of us and we'll feature you, whatever the field.

Twitter: @just_shaun