First!

After years of deriving both information and entertainment from various blogs, I have finally decided to start my own. By doing so, I am also living up to a commitment I made in the application for a grant which I have now held for over a year…

I intend to blog about anything I find interesting in the broad categories of physics and mathematics, as well as my own activities which relate to them. In practice, I imagine this will mean lots of posts about recent news in particle physics, and shameless plugs for my own work. From time to time I might write something semi-technical about a well-known topic in physics or maths which I have recently found interesting.

For now, I leave you with some names which I wrote down during the one-man brainstorming session which ultimately led to this blog being called "Cross Sections":

"Wanton Cohomology" — A terrific pun on "quantum cohomology".

"Anomalous Diversion" — Another tenuous pun, this time on the "anomalous divergence", in a quantum field theory, of a classically-conserved current.

"Lie Groupie" — Sadly, I suppose this is also a pun, this time implying that I am infatuated by Sophus Lie, the groups which bear his name, or both.

So as well as the three meanings of "cross sections" (one for physicists, one for mathematicians, and the other as a metaphor for this blog), which I thought made it the perfect choice, it was the only idea I had which wasn't a pun…