Ted Bunn
(no relation, unfortunately.)
Office
Hours:
|
Mon 3-5
Wed 2-3
Thu3:-4
(or by appointment)
|
Current Courses:
- Physics 301: Mathematical Methods in Physics.
Information for students in this course can be found on Blackboard.
- Physics
397/398/497/498:
Junior/Senior Seminar. Information about upcoming talks
will be posted on the Physics
Department web page.
Research Interests:
My research focuses on cosmology, the study of the origin and
evolution of the Universe as
a whole. My particular specialty is analyzing and interpreting
data from measurements of the
cosmic
microwave background radiation.
My research page
describes some things my students and I have been working on
lately. You
can also take a look at my curriculum vitae
or my publications if you really want
to.
Some things I've written:
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observations of black holes are a few years out of date, but the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.
Miscellaneous links:
