Petition reaches 17,500 signatures. Thanks for your support!

Just a quick note to thank everyone who signed the online petition calling for government action on the STFC funding crisis. The petition has now closed and yielded an impressive 17,518 signatures. By the end it was one of the top 10 most supported petitions on the site. This is well beyond what any of us hoped for when we started out. Most encouraging was the depth of support from outside the affected fields, from the wider physics community to other areas of science and the general public. The petition attracted support from all levels of science, from the big names to undergraduates, many of whom organised a petition awareness day in physics departments nationwide.

The government's response so far hasn't been very different to the line they have been following throughout the debate "funding has broadly increased but tough decisions had to be made". However, the strength of support for the petition has clearly raised awareness of the consequences of the cuts both inside and outside of government. Hopefully this will help those negotiating to mitigate the damage.

Once again, thank you to everyone who supported the petition and spread the word. We have at the very least shown that science matters to more people than those holding the purse strings in Whitehall could have imagined!

Will

My Postgraduate Students' Physics Grandfather

Postgraduate advisor-advisee relationships often bring up discussions of physics genealogy -- for example the fact that students of my colleague Dave Wark, such as Ian, will share their physics grandfather with me.

Through all the variations such discussions can take, one common question is "what was my physics grandparent like?"

My advisor was Peter Fisher, and I was his first student, and there are lots of things I could say in response (and probably will), but it is not often that you can point to a clip from the Late Night with Conan O'Brien programme to answer the question....

So here he is in all his glory:
NBC Television(in the US), or, slightly more dodgily: A certain google-owned site