To all my family and friends, to all good people everywhere… happy 2013!
For me, 2012 was… interesting. Business-wise, it was not a good year (indeed, another year like 2011 and 2012 and I will be seriously worried). In other respects, however, it was a fruitful one. Our Pioneer results are now published, indeed we earned a place on the cover of Physical Review Letters, and also on the cover of IEEE Spectrum. I had several other papers accepted in respectable journals. I was also making some slow progress with my attempts to derive a weak-field formulation of Moffat’s gravity theory that would allow us to study extended distributions of matter, both continua and N-body systems.
My wife and I celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary in September, and we survived a minor health crisis with no lasting ill effects. Our closest family members are also all in good health, so who are we to complain? The world, meanwhile, didn’t end despite a certain Mayan calendar’s dreaded predictions, the Eurozone is still there, the economy is limping ahead (at least here in North America), so for now, all is well. Now about that fiscal cliff…
Anyhow, I’m looking forward to 2013. I have some interesting contract work. I’ll be going to Texas to talk at a conference early in the coming year. And, I hope, I’ll be able to continue my work on modified gravity and achieve some useful results.
And last but not least… in a few months, I will be half a century old. A strange milestone, as I am still wondering what I’ll be when I grow up.
I was interested to see that solving the Pioneer anomaly made at least one blogger’s list of the top physics events of the year: http://resonaances.blogspot.ca/2012/12/2012-highlights.html