The Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to these three.
“James Peebles, from Canada, has been awarded half of the 9m Swedish kronor (£740,000) prize for his theoretical discoveries about the evolution of the universe. The Swiss astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz share the other half of the prize for their discovery of the first planet beyond our solar system.”
I like it that the three heads are shown not in a photograph but in a drawing, rather reminiscent of the “artists’ impressions” that are used to show defendants and lawyers in courtrooms. The reason I like it is that I once made a drawing of cosmologist Peebles.
This was one of the many ridiculous posters that Professor Bill Brantley got me to make, advertizing events in the spectacular “Energy” course that he organized each year in Furman University. The only one of these three characters that I could draw from life was Steven Anderson, professor of music; Peebles and Ashforth I had to draw from publicity photos they had sent. Such photos are often in use long after they were created.
Evidently “Philip J.E. Peebles” was the form of his name that he preferred at that time. In Wikipedia he is now “Jim.” (His surname is the name of a town and county in Scotland.) He is a deep thinker about “primordial nucleosynthesis, dark matter, the cosmic microwave background, and structure formation.”
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This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.
Nice poster. I like how “Big Bang” is exploding.
Keyboard is cool too. I like how the forearms coming out of the tape represent the pre recorded parts of the piano concert.
Your sketch style reminds me of that found in underground newspapers and comics some 50 years ago.
I love the poster! I wish I could have taken this class.
As a high school sophomore I had an aha moment in a very innovative social studies class. Students’ learning was largely self-directed, one could choose among a number of different modules on different topics. I was working on a module about African drumming. The social studies class provided some readings about the role of drumming in different African cultures. I got interested in how drumming induces trance states of consciousness. I talked with my orchestra teacher, who explained how (most) drums don’t play just one pure tone, but rather the drum’s fundamental tone produces lots of overtones. And my biology teacher explained how each of the hair cells in the cochlea of the ear responds to one specific frequency of sound, so something with lots of overtones stimulates lots of hair cells and thus sends a complicated signal through the nerves to the brain. It was a formative experience for me to be able to research and integrate knowledge from a variety of disciplines to understand a phenomenon.
(Also, I’m pleasantly surprised that my employer’s computer network now lets your blog posts come through the firewall.)
This is interesting to me for several reasons. One is that I now have a cochlear implant, which bypasses those hairs, sending sound directly to the auditory nerve. I didn’t know that fact you mention about the hairs.
This isn’t a ridiculous poster, it is an awesome poster!