Stephen Webb

Where Is Everybody

There is something beguiling about paradox. The visual paradoxes of Maurits Escher’s prints never fail to entice the eye. Poems such as Robert Graves’ Warning to Children, which play with the paradox of infinite regress, make the head spin. Paradox lies at the heart of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, one of the 20(^{th}) century’s greatest novels. My favorite paradox, though, is that of Fermi.

Pondering the Fermi Paradox

The past two decades have witnessed an unprecedented increase in the amount and quality of observational data available to astronomers and cosmologists. Orbiting observatories such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) have peered at the universe through a variety of windows in the electromagnetic spectrum. Ground-based projects such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (Adelman- McCarthy et al., 2008) and the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey (Colless et al., 2003) have mapped the distribution of galaxies in exquisite detail. Taken together, data from these and other projects have transformed our understanding of the large-scale structure of the universe, have steadily improved our knowledge of key cosmological parameters, and have provided compelling evidence in favor of a simple cosmological model (Spergel et al., 2009).

Twitter use in physics conferences

An analysis of Twitter use in 116 conferences suggests that the service is used more extensively at PACS10 conferences (those devoted to the physics of elementary particles and fields) and PACS90 conferences (those devoted to geophysics, astronomy, and astrophysics) than at conferences in other fields of physics. Furthermore, Twitter is used in a qualitatively different manner. A possible reason for these differences is discussed.

Learning {Re}imagined

By Graham Brown-Martin, London, Bloomsbury Academic, 328 pp. £29.99 (pbk), ISBN: 9781474222730.

All the Wonder that Would Be

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If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens ... Where Is Everybody?: Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life

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