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  Who else is off to Spain (or Iceland, or Greenland, or… ) for the eclipse?

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  Partial

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  The full image of the sun looks like a disc, but you can see the shape of the ongoing partial eclipse due to the imperfect optics of my phone camera.

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  It’s wonderful when the front page of the newspaper is about astronomy instead of, well, almost anything else.

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  The Random Universe in Physics World: A masterful and refreshing take… I found the book’s thesis – that uncertainty is not a hindrance to knowledge, but an opportunity to learn (and learn more) about the world – simultaneously liberating, humbling and empowering. — Chrysi Malouchou Kanellopoulou https://physicsworld.com/a/knowing-through-uncertainty-probability-and-the-evolution-of-our-cosmos/

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  “University leaders are warning of financial turmoil in British higher education after new figures suggested a collapse in international student numbers would deprive the sector of vital income and undermine its future.” The problem is having so heavily relied on gouging foreign students to begin with. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2026/aug/13/uk-universities-face-financial-crisis-amid-collapse-in-international-students

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  “I never got to be an astronaut, but I did get to be part of the Planck Satellite team.” —Me, interviewed by Brian Clegg on PopScienceBooks about why I do the science I do, and why I wrote The Random Universe. https://popsciencebooks.blogspot.com/2026/08/andrew-jaffe-five-way-interview.html

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  Casualty, lost to the rocks of the iron-age fortifications of Os Castros de Baroña, Galicia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castro_de_Baroña

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  Being an atheist and born Jewish, and only having walked the last 20km of the Camino de Santiago, I was surprised to feel so moved by our arrival at the Cathedral.

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  Jasper Johns’ “Slice”, a mashup of the CfA galaxy redshift survey, spied on a visit to the Guggenheim Bilbao. I recognised the pattern of dots — famous among cosmologists — from across the room, surprised to see it amongst Johns’ usual flags, targets, crosshatches, and numbers.

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  “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler” — a childhood favorite I’ve just finished reading with my kids, a bit younger than Claudia & Jamie in the book — was as wonderful as I remembered. Whenever we go to a museum they’ll be scouting out places to sleep, and secrets…

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  NASA’s Roman Telescope Leaves Earth to Chart the Stars The latest great space telescope, targeting the history and evolution of the Universe and planets around other stars, launched by NASA in collaboration with astronomers around the world. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/30/science/spacex-roman-telescope-launch.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

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  I’ll be in New York 14–19 September. If anyone knows of a seminar slot, a podcast, a bookshop, or a living room that might want a cosmologist talking about probability, epistemology, and The Random Universe — I’d love to hear from you. Very short notice, entirely shameless. https://andrewjaffe.net/the-random-universe

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  Due to a booking mishap (mine) we are beset by the horror of an extra night in Southwest France.

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  As of last week I’ve been living in the UK for 25 years.

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  Twenty-five years ago, I moved from San Francisco to the UK, from a fellowship at Berkeley to a permanent job at Imperial College, London. A lot has changed since then. I was 35; now I am 60. It was two weeks before 9/11; the world hasn’t seemed as open and free since. I arrived from the Bay Area just after the first dot-com bubble burst. London, adjusting to New Labour after almost two decades of Thatcher and Thatcherism, felt exciting and ... https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2026/09/25-60/

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  New post: The Talk I Gave on September 12 More 25th anniversary thoughts and recollections. I was heading off to Durham, in the north of England — my first big talk now that I had started my permanent academic job. I arrived toward the end of the first day of the conference: September 11, 2001. https://andrewjaffe.net/blog/2026/09/the-talk-i-gave-on-september-12/

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  First solo trip to NYC in more than a decade, visiting the Simons Foundation Flatiron Institute for their Learning The Universe meeting. https://www.simonsfoundation.org/event/simons-collaboration-on-learning-the-universe-annual-meeting-2026/

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  I just received a message from a colleague that a proposal we had been working on was “tabled” at a meeting. I hope that this means it was brought up and considered, but there is a nagging worry that it could also mean set aside.

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  Me, opining on topology over at “Universe Today”. https://www.universetoday.com/articles/astronomys-decades-long-quest-to-understand-cosmic-topology

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  Another London pub talk! Come hear me discuss The Random Universe and the Big Bang at Pints Of Knowledge on 16 June at The Blues Kitchen in Brixton. https://www.tickettailor.com/events/pintsofknowledge/2190744