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Snow, salt, ancient music
On Tuesday myself and two friends went to a concert. We left work at six o’clock and drove south to the coast, following a small road hemmed in on one side by the sea and on the other by the Étang du Prévost. Our destination was the Cathédrale de Maguelone, an ancient church occasionally referred…
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On the use of ChatGPT in academia
Creation is a sacred act. From the profundity of making a new life to the mundanity of whistling a tune through one’s teeth whilst doing the washing up, human life is filled from end to end with acts of creation. So smitten with creativity are we that we would love to see our own creations…
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For once, then, something
For the past year, I have been stuck in a research slump. One year ago, I started applying for jobs; and with fellowship applications in the mix too, the whole period from October to December disappeared into the mire of proposals, cover letters and research statements. When I emerged after Christmas, it was into the…
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A moveable feast
I have lived in Paris for eighteen months. Or, rather, I have lived in Paris proper for six months. For the year before that, I lived in Orsay, a small town in a far southern extremity of the city. Close enough to be in Zone 5 on the RER, but distant enough that it was…
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Two weeks in the USA with the Ilford Sprite 35
In August I spent two weeks in the USA; one week in Chicago, attending a conference at KICP, and the second week on holiday, taking the sleeper train from Chicago to Seattle and spending five days on the west coast. It was a big and exciting trip, and I was determined to capture it as…
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Cosmology’s first century
A guided tour of the Universe from Einstein to JWST It was a great pleasure to be invited to the Charlbury Beer Festival in June 2023 to give a talk in the culture tent. The topic I chose to discuss was gravity, and more specifically how our best theory of gravity, Einstein’s theory of general…
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Cosmic variance
Or, everyone in the world is French M. Luc Arnaud farmed a small plot somewhere in the south of France. Exactly when and exactly where M. Arnaud’s farm was is now no longer remembered, but we can be sure that he had a few cows, a few pigs, a few chickens and one rather moth-eaten…
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Measuring line-of-sight shear with Einstein rings
Today I released a paper written in collaboration with Pierre Fleury, Julien Larena and Matteo Martinelli on how we can measure line-of-sight shear from Einstein rings. But what is line-of-sight shear, and why are we interested in measuring it in the first place? To answer these questions, let’s review the phenomenon of strong gravitational lensing.…
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Why I have a website (and why you should too)
Academics can often be rather squeamish about self-promotion. I myself am not a fan of writing endless cover letters and research statements where I have to act as the sole and assiduously devoted marketer and salesperson for the brand that is Natalie B. Hogg: CosmologistTM. But the squeamishness, and the attendant procrastination that can turn…
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Disquiet, defiance and the point of no return in Mozart’s Don Giovanni
There are fewer more dramatic moments in opera than the ending of Don Giovanni, when the title character refuses to repent for his sins and gets pulled down into hell by a chorus of demons. However, this showstopping coup de théâtre is in fact a footnote to the oft-overlooked actual narrative and musical climax, which…
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Natalie B. Hogg 