Ted Bunn’s Blog

These are in roughly increasing order of technical difficulty.

• Quite a few years ago, I wrote some answers to frequently asked questions about black holes. (The sections that describe astronomical observations of black holes are a few years out of date, but the theory of black holes hasn’t changed recently, so the theoretical parts are still current.)
• I post articles on a variety of topics to the moderated Usenet newsgroup sci.physics.research. (For many years, I was also one of the group’s moderators, by the way.) There’s an archive of posts to sci.physics.research at Cornell, and of course Google also has an archive.
• Bayesian inference is the quantitative way of describing how a person’s opinions about a scientific (or in principle any other) issue get updated when new data come in. I wrote a description of how Bayesian inference works in a particular example, specifically how my opinion of the density of the Universe changed in the light of some recent data.
• How does the electric field get out of a black hole? This question was posed a while back in the Q&A section of the American Journal of Physics. Matt McIrvin and I wrote a brief answer that was published in the journal. You can view our answer in either HTML or PostScript format.
• John Baez and I wrote an explanation of the meaning of Einstein’s field equation. This is one of the most important equations in physics, but it’s generally thought to be too difficult for anyone but specialists to understand. We show how to state the equation without too much daunting mathematics.
• I gave a series of lectures at a NATO Advanced Study Institute on the cosmic microwave background radiation.
• You can get my Ph.D. thesis in either gzipped PostScript or PDF format.
• In addition to the above, I’ve written a number of journal articles, most of which are available for download on astro-ph and gr-qc.