Checking In

I'm traveling right now, and so only really have time to quickly check in. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was in England for a few days and am now on the Italian island of Ischia, at the International Conference on the CMB and the Early Universe. I got here on Wednesday afternoon and my talk was scheduled as the second one of the conference, beginning on Thursday. However, Michael Turner, the first person scheduled, wasn't able to make it, and I ended up speaking first. This was fine by me, since I love to get my presentation out of the way early so as to get the maximum amount of time in a relaxed frame of mind to enjoy the rest of the conference and, you know, this beautiful island. My somewhat unwieldy assigned title was Physics of the very early Universe: what can we learn from particle collider experiments?, and I gave the usual broad overview of how, particularly when it comes to dark matter and the question of why the universe is fundamentally matter-antimatter asymmetric, colliders experiments and observational cosmology may work very well as complementary probes. Today, Bernard Sadoulet gave a very nice talk in which he discussed one of the other ways of learning about dark matter - through direct detection experiments. My favorite talk of the conference so far (although I have enjoyed most of them) was a joint talk given by Anthony Lasenby and Mike Hobson, both from Cambridge, in which they discussed in a very pedagogical way how one performs Bayesian estimates of whether cosmological datasets prefer one particular theoretical model over another one. This is a topic somewhat far from my particular expertise, but they did such a nice job that I really came away thinking I'd learned something new and interesting. Tonight I'm off to dinner with a few friends and then tomorrow I leave around noon, heading back to England for one night and then straight back to the U.S. on Sunday to get a day's rest before heading to Michigan State University to give a seminar on Tuesday. Ciao.