Life in optical

Nature does its thing

I stumbled upon this quote today and liked it so much that it deserves a little blog post and not ‘just a tweet’

“Nature, which makes nothing durable, always repeats itself so that nothing which it makes may be lost.”

- Oscar Wilde

I love how insightful this quote is, but perhaps because it is so open to interpretation.
While things evolve, they are not lost, they just become undecipherable: what has been is a sequence of required states/stages to become what is today and what will become. But: 1 – while the path we take to reach something is needed to get there, being somewhere doesn’t tell us how we got there, and 2 – it also doesn’t say that the path is unique.

What do you think?

PS: I love quotes that at first make you smile, then think, then remain slightly unsatisfied with more questions than answers.

Yabi on the beach

A month ago, I joined the AIMS Cosmology research group. Bruce Basset’s (our unanimously admired professor :) ) cosmology group itself isn’t new but what is new is that we now are at AIMS.

Yesterday we had a bunch of visitors and we had a great group day.

A friendly, openminded, inspiring atmosphere is such an asset in a research group that I though I should mention this specifically.

The group has a weekly day-long meeting which involves a journal club, perhaps a short talk and a ‘hack’ session of a few hours where we learn to dabble in new skills under the guidance of our resident expert and hack along on mini projects. Everyone’s involved: students, researchers, visitors, the big boss. The weekly day also involves walks on the beach, coffee and lunch together, which are great moments to discuss projects, ideas and issues. We are all settling in the format and this has become a nice feature of our week.

Working together in unassigned offices

Last week there was a cool conference in Stellenbosch, for which a number of scientists came from abroad. South Africa being a faraway destination for most, many decided to stay on for a week or two. We invited Hillary Sanctuary to come and give the first ‘CosmoAIMS’ seminar of the year and invited whoever was still around to come along.

What happened is that suddenly the group size doubled. We went from about ten to twenty people. Most stayed all day using available desk space and collaborating on projects, participating in the journal club, attending the seminar, coming along for lunch, and even for dinner. All in all it was a great day. Who knows how many of the ideas discussed will lead to papers or jobs ultimately? Even if it’s a small fraction, so many ideas were discussed that it definitely beats not having such a day.

Lively discussions at coffee

One thing that made this so easy was that we don’t really have assigned desks as group members so no table looks like it belongs to anyone. So when visitors come along, they are free to feel as much at home as anyone else.

The fact that we have one day a week that we spend together is a very special thing in itself. We don’t lock ourselves away in our offices working on out own separate projects and that makes a big difference when it comes to feeling part of a group.

I feel that we shouldn’t underestimate the importance of social cohesion in a research group and that it probably is neglected more often than we think.

Thanks to all who were there yesterday, we had a great day!

Cape Town Lion’s Head Moonrise from carolune on Vimeo.

I dreamt of a night sky full of colourful stars – of course :) What did you think of?

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the famous Pale Blue Dot picture. It was a collective revelation. The day we had to realise all of our egos fit into 3 pixels…

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Read more about the story of the Pale Blue Dot picture

And here is a talk in which Brian Cox tells us why the perspective the Pale Blue Dot gave us 20 years ago still matters today. Enjoy.