Cosmology for High School Students

Today was a pretty exhausting but fun day. My afternoon was taken up with the usual parts of my job - attending meetings, squeezing in some calculations, attending a seminar and meeting with students from my undergraduate class - PHY312 - Relativity and Cosmology: Einstein and Beyond - to discuss their end of semester projects. But my morning was taken up with a less traditional activity. A high school teacher who comes to all of the Saturday Morning Physics lectures I run, is teaching a talented class of seniors in his school. They have been peppering him with questions about cosmology and particle physics over the last few months and, since these aren't things he's trained in, he decided to ask me if I'd come in to chat with them. So this morning, two of my graduate students and I went out to the school and spent a couple of hours describing what we do, talking about cosmology, and taking great questions from about twenty students. We had a blast! The students were tremendous fun and also very sweet. One of them (and her Mom I think) had even baked a cake for our visit that had "Thanks Dr. Trodden" and a couple of black holes iced on the top! We talked about the physics of black holes, the expansion of the universe, dark energy, time travel, teleportation, and a host of other ideas. Perhaps best of all, they got to meet my students - who don't at all resemble stereotypical physicists - and hopefully widen their idea of what scientists are like. If they enjoyed it anywhere near as much as I did, then I'll be delighted.