Category: Academia
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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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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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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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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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The howling Universe
Before I moved from IFT to IPhT, I filmed a video all about what standard sirens are and why they’re useful for cosmology. The video is now on Youtube, in English with Spanish subtitles. Take a look!
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From Madrid to the Cotswolds by train
I can’t pretend to enjoy flying. It’s noisy, stressful and horrendously bad for the environment. On my last journey to Madrid, I took the ferry from Portsmouth to Santander and the train on from there. The ferry crossing itself took about thirty hours spread over two nights (with an evening departure and an early morning…
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Implicit none
The first programming language I ever learned was Fortran. And before you ask, no, I’m not seventy years old. It just so happened that during my undergraduate degree, I took two courses on numerical methods for physics which were taught in Fortran, and for good reason: Fortran is still one of the best languages to…
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The road (back) to Madrid
On Friday last week I signed my contract and started my job as a postdoctoral researcher at the IFT in Madrid. It feels extremely good to type that. I have also been waiting a very long time to write this post. I was offered this job on the 12th of April 2020 — when the…
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My PhD viva
In this post, I’ll discuss how I prepared for my PhD viva exam in cosmology, what the viva itself was like and what happened next. I submitted my PhD thesis on the 4th of January 2021 (which also happened to be my birthday) and had my viva exam on the 3rd of February. This is…
Natalie B. Hogg 