Top all-time · #6389
In the Dark
Personal blog · telescoper.wordpress.comsciencephilosophy
In the Dark is a personal blog at telescoper.wordpress.com about science and philosophy. Since 2009, 13 different Hacker News readers have linked it 22 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-02, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (9) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Peter Coles's In the Dark blog for posts on astronomy and cosmology, such as the EDGES signal and M87 ring-or-artefact questions, open access publishing under Plan S, and Bayesian statistics.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 9 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
A blog about the Universe, and all that surrounds it
Most-linked posts?
- /2022/05/13/m87-ring-or-artefact/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-05-14
What Hacker News says?
Producing an "image" of a black holes requires astronomical, ahem, resolution because they're so far away (thankfully). To achieve this kind of resolution you need an aperture of thousand of kilometers. The EHT images are created using synthetic aperture techniques to create an effective aperture with a diameter of earth's orbit around the sun. But this is only currently possible at radio frequencies due to our abil…
Comment linking /2022/05/13/m87-ring-or-artefact/
on “James Webb first images – complete set of high resolution shots now live”Submitted Can Black Holes Create Dark Energy? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe matter and light radiated away from black hole (BH) mergers will all come from the accretion discs of each BH. The accretion discs of the BH masses for which LIGO (and Virgo) is most sensitive will generally be fairly sparse, so the emissions will generally be fairly dim. For a pair of similar-mass neutron stars (NS) that merge into a BH, you can treat region of spacetime close to the merger as being filled with…
Comment linking /2017/08/23/ligo-leaks-and-ngc-4993/
on “Rumours swell over new kind of gravitational-wave sighting”Submitted The Largest Map of the Universe as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> Has anyone [in the MoND world] looked into the James Webb observations Probably. Certainly non-MoND people have: > so give me some rope Ok, here's some rope < https://telescoper.wordpress.com/2022/08/10/recalibration-of... > Telescoper is an anagram of Peter Coles. It's his blog. He's a well known physical cosmologist < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Coles >. Adams et al., authors of the preprint linked in th…
Comment linking /2022/08/10/recalibration-of-ultra-high-redshift-galaxies/
on “Dark Matter Doesn't Exist”Submitted BICEP2: Is the Signal Cosmological? as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> "usable link" How much technical detail do you want? Starting with the "gimme hardcore!" end, I was thinking of how to construct an argument using vierbiens and then how to boil it down to something accessible (or at least representable on LaTeX-free HN), and then remembered that it had already been done by Cooperstock et al.: http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/9803097 The tl;dr is that if the cosmological expansion…
Comment linking /2011/08/19/is-space-expanding/
on “First detection of the missing half of normal matter in our universe”Submitted Academic Publishing as Exploitation as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI think that EDGES probably didn't see a real signal is more or less the expectation of the field. I remember that the feelings towards the result at the time was quite sceptical, and it seems it didn't take long before someone discovered that the published result wasn't very robust: https://telescoper.wordpress.com/2018/09/03/edges-and-foregr... The people from the follow up instruments are very polite about all th…
Comment linking /2018/09/03/edges-and-foregrounds/
on “Four years on, new experiment sees no sign of ‘cosmic dawn’”Submitted What Is a Singularity? as a story · 1 points
HN discussion"Objective wavefunction collapse" is not a good "aka" for the CI. There is a great deal of objectivity in it but there's an essential element of subjectivity (shared by neo-CI descendants of the CI such as QBism and Rovelli's relational interpretation) too. Streater's discussion of EPR explains why: https://web.archive.org/web/20151117174141/http://www.mth.kc... Broadly speaking, the CI and its "radical" psi-epistem…
Comment linking /2017/06/23/the-quantum-mechanics-of-voting/
on “Lost Causes of Theoretical Physics (2003)”Submitted One Hundred Years of the Cosmological Constant as a story · 1 points
HN discussionOh, hey, on the CMB front Peter Coles ( http://telescoper.wordpress.com/ ) of Cardiff University says it better here https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Glossary/Essay_lss.html (1999). I strongly recommend the second paragraph, starting, "To visualise...", (with the tiny caveat that there is an unstated choice of gauge in the "about twice the speed of light"), and the fourth paragraph starting, "Imagine...".
Comment linking /
on “Chromoscope: the Milky Way in different wavelengths”Submitted Uccello and the Problem of Space as a story · 1 points
HN discussion"M87: Ring or Artefact?": https://telescoper.wordpress.com/2022/05/13/m87-ring-or-arte...
Comment linking /2022/05/13/m87-ring-or-artefact/
on “Jet and resolved features of the central black hole M87 observed with EHT”Submitted R.I.P. John David Jackson (1925-2016) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> In kids’ shows back then, there were no missiles loaded with sexual references - or clever deconstructions of TV itself - aimed above young heads As soon as I got to this bit I knew either the author was deeply wrong or pretending to be so for the sake of the article; so much British kids TV had a surreal, occasionally dark tone to it in the 80s. Danger Mouse was a fourth-wall breaking spy parody. The Magic Rounda…
Comment linking /2014/08/28/round-the-horn-antenna/
on “When nostalgia fails: a dad rewatches the TV of his childhood”I'd add https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.03312 too, as a link to the actual paper's arxiv version. Bimetric theories are pretty strongly disfavoured on the grounds that there is an apparent universal coupling to the single metric g_\alpha\beta which lets us treat the metric as a geometrical property of spacetime, which gives us General Relativity everywhere we can presently look, and even in places we can't (GR as an effe…
Comment linking /2016/11/28/nailing-cosmological-jelly-to-the-wall/
on “Theory challenging Einstein's view on speed of light could soon be tested”No, it's related to grant requirements around Plan S ( https://telescoper.wordpress.com/2023/03/02/article-processi... ).
Comment linking /2023/03/02/article-processing-charges-at-the-royal-astronomical-society/
on “Royal Astronomical Society: all journals to publish as open access from 2024”I think it's due to Plan S, see https://telescoper.wordpress.com/?s=plan+s .
Comment linking /?s=plan+s
on “Royal Astronomical Society: all journals to publish as open access from 2024”While for other fields Gold Open Access may be a good thing, in astronomy it is worse than the status quo. Most papers were on arxiv, so people could read for free anyway. I've already seen comments saying we should switch to PASA which is has no page charges (unless you want to do the Gold Open Access thing) https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/publications-of-the-... The right thing to do would be to switch to…
Comment linking /
on “Royal Astronomical Society: all journals to publish as open access from 2024”Peter Coles has been applying Bayesian statistics to cosmology for at least fifteen years. In the following blog note he explains how Bayesian probability really is only a tradeoff by using Doomsday Argument as a pedagogical exapmle. http://telescoper.wordpress.com/category/bad-statistics/
Comment linking /category/bad-statistics/
on “Carter Catastrophe : Calculating the Probability of Doomsday”
