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Showing posts from February, 2015

Shooting relativistic fish in a rational barrel

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I need to take a breather from grant writing, which is consuming almost every waking hour in between all of the other things that I still need to do. So see this post as a cathartic exercise. What makes a scientist? Is it the qualification? What you do day-to-day? The association and societies to which you belong? I think a unique definition may be impossible as there is a continuum of properties of scientists. This makes it a little tricky for the lay-person to identify "real science" from "fringe science" (but, in all honesty, the distinction between these two is often not particularly clear cut). One thing that science (and many other fields) do is have meetings, conferences and workshops to discuss their latest results. Some people seem to spend their lives flitting between exotic locations essentially presenting the same talk to almost the same audience, but all scientists probably attend a conference or two per year. In one of my own fields, namely cosm