Breakthroughs, Beermats and the Bending of Light
I found out on the way home from Armagh yesterday that this year’s Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (worth $3,000,000) has been awarded to the team behind the Event Horizon Telescope which was featured in newspaper and magazines around the world in April this year and which I blogged about here. There are 347 members of the team so it amounts to an average of less than $9000 per person, but let me offer them all my sincerest congratulations!
Coincidentally, just before my talk at INAM2019 yesterday I noticed that the Armagh Observatory and Planetarium stocks these items:
I’m not sure they are intended to be used as beer mats but that’s what they look like! Anyway, I picked one up and showed it at the end of my talk. I was talking about the 1919 eclipse expeditions, which I have done rather a lot these days, and finished up by mentioning that the events of a hundred years ago ushered in a century of developments in relativistic astrophysics, including gravitational lensing, gravitational waves and of course the Event Horizon Telescope.
If you’re interested here are the slides I used for this (short) talk:
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In the Dark 
September 7, 2019 at 6:14 pm
They are beer mats – the UK ALMA ARC have printed a few different ones over the years. I think https://twitter.com/adam_avison is behind them. I have one that’s very useful as it has the ALMA bands printed on the back!