Away to Swansea
Just time for a quick post this evening, primarily to make a note of an enjoyable event that took place this afternoon. I long since gave up keeping a proper journal so the old blog will have to play that role.
Today a small group of cosmologists from the School of Physics & Astronomy at Cardiff University made the short trip to Swansea to meet with members of the Physics department there. The idea of the meeting was to explore the possibilites of future research collaboration. For historical reasons there is a pretty strong separation in Wales between research in Particle Physics and Astronomy/Astrophysics; Swansea does the former and Cardiff does the latter. However, cosmology is an area in which there are possible overlaps between some of the – primarily theoretical – research going on at Swansea into, e.g., Quantum Gravity and what we do in Cardiff, e.g. inflationary cosmology.
Anyway we decided to get together for an afternoon of talks by members of both departments to see if anything emerged as potential research topics. In fact, a couple of interesting ideas were discussed and although the main focus of research differs substantially in the two institutions we’re definitely going to get together again to follow up these ideas.
Although I’ve been in Cardiff since 2007, I’d never visited Swansea University before which, considering that it’s only an hour away by train, is admittedly a bit pathetic. In fact I think it’s quite weird the two departments don’t collaborate more in other areas too. I’m certainly very keen to see more joint activities than we have now, so hopefully this is a move in that direction.
Anyway, I’d like to thank Graham Shore at Swansea for hosting us this afternoon and I very much look forward to the planned return leg which will be held in Cardiff in a couple of months.
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In the Dark 
January 11, 2012 at 9:44 pm
There was a somewhat similar initiative between the Astrophysics Group of the University of Wales College of Cardiff and the Particle Physics Group of University College Swansea starting around 1994. A number of Cardiff astrophysicists travelled over to Swansea in a minibus one Saturday for a series of talks by both groups. Several members of each group gave a 10-15 minute talk about their particular research interests. This involved the whole Cardiff Astrophysics Group, not just cosmologists. This was at the time that Ian Halliday was head of the Swansea physics department. Following this, Warren Perkins from Swansea travelled over each week to give a graduate-level lecture course on particle physics in Cardiff.
The initiative seemed to fade out after a couple of years or so.