So what is this site about?
Excursion Set is a blog written by Richard Easther, a theoretical cosmologist at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. “To a mathematician or an astrophysicist, the phrase ‘excursion set’ is a term of art,” he explains. “But it also suggests a series of adventures, and on my blog I make excursions into cosmology, astrophysics, particle physics, science news and scientific perspectives on everyday life.”
What are some of the topics covered?
As the above explanation suggests, it is common for Easther’s blog posts to begin with one subject and then lead, via a pleasant and logical path, to a different one. A blog post on “The angle of repose”, for example, begins with an account of Easther’s research-related visit to the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan. Pretty soon, however, he takes an excursion to a nearby temple, and before you know it, he’s into the physics of Zen sand-gardening and the difficulties of maintaining the temple’s beautiful, UNESCO-listed sandcastle. At the end, he concludes that “playing with sand provides work for physicists as well as for gardening monks”. In another post, he declares that “making up stories about the material world seems to be one of the few universal human activities”, and then deftly turns an explanation of his recent work on N-body simulations into a romantic comedy of gravitational attraction.
Anything else?
Bad or over-hyped science reporting is another common theme. Unusually, though, he seems to think this is partly the fault of specialist science bloggers, and not just mainstream journalists. Bloggers and Tweeters are, he notes, “key consumers of the media releases cranked out by Nature and university media people, and come largely from the same demographic as the scientists who complain about pressure to sex [their research] up for Nature. If Nature didn’t exist, would we have needed to invent it?”
Why should I visit?
Easther is a good science communicator, and although his blog isn’t updated all that often (about twice a month on average), he’s had some interesting things to say when big science stories have emerged. In March 2013, for example, he live-blogged the release of data from the Planck team, and earlier this year he was one of many contributors to online discussions of the BICEP2 results. This debate, he points out, is a great example of “open science” in action, with hundreds or even thousands of scientists worldwide scrutinizing the results to determine whether they really constitute evidence for cosmic inflation. And contrary to the idea that nobody would eat sausage if they could see it being made, he argues, “a sausage factory with a window is more likely to be a sausage factory that is spotlessly clean and uses top-quality raw materials”.
Can you give me a sample quote?
From a post about BICEP2 on 17 April: “For theoretical physicists, ambulance chasing involves getting papers out quickly after a major data release. Some ambulance chasers make significant contributions, some are just trying to draw attention to their earlier work, while others are banging out insubstantial papers in the hope that they will be cited by their slower colleagues. But whatever their motives, cosmologists have certainly been busy: the BICEP2 discovery paper has been cited 188 times on arXiv, all in preprints written within a month of the original announcement. I am pretty sure this is a world record, and you can always check the current tally. In fairness, though, cosmologists were so giddy about BICEP2 it wouldn’t have surprised me if someone had stolen an ambulance and driven it in circles, flashing the lights and letting rip with the siren.”
