theoretical cosmologist
A friend took me by surprise with this question yesterday afternoon, and it took me a moment to come up with a suitable response. Twenty-four hours later and I'm still thinking about it, pondering what the essence of a PhD really is. Baldly speaking, a PhD is a postgraduate research degree that typically lasts around …
At the very end of February, I published my first paper. In this post, I want to provide a brief, non-technical overview of what we* were doing in this work and the results we found. The manuscript is currently under review at MNRAS but you can view the preprint here: http://www.arxiv.org/abs/1902.10694. The aim of this …
Continue reading Constraints on the interacting vacuum — geodesic CDM scenario
I published my first paper at the end of February. I won't beat about the bush: writing this paper was exhausting. I'd had unrealistic expectations for how quickly I'd get publishable results, and consequently every delay to our draft felt like a disaster. At first we were going to be ready by July (2018). Then …
Continue reading Surviving burn out and the post-paper blues
Last week I attended the 26th annual Congres des Doctorants organised by students of the STEP'UP Doctoral School in Paris and hosted at the Institut de Physique du Globe, near the Pierre and Marie Curie campus of the Sorbonne. The doctoral school comprises physics and geosciences students from almost every university in Paris and I …
I spent the past week at the Lorentz Institute, the theoretical cosmology part of the physics community at Leiden University. My collaborators there are fellow members of CANTATA, an EU COST-Action that is mainly focused on creating and testing alternative theories of gravity, and I was awarded my second STSM (short-term scientific mission) by CANTATA …
This week I'm in the Netherlands, visiting colleagues at the Lorentz Institute at Leiden University. Leiden is a beautiful place-- a scaled-down, tourist-free version of Amsterdam-- and the institute is nice too. It's the oldest theoretical physics institute in the Netherlands and has played host to many greats of the field, including Ehrenfest, Fermi and …
It turns out that maintaining a blog is somewhat difficult when faced with the time-consuming Cerberus that is a PhD. But, fuelled with a desire to practice my non-technical writing, I am dusting off my typing fingers and trying again. Two weeks ago I had my Major Review, which is essentially Portsmouth's qualifying exam for …
