Sauvignon from Chile March 27, 2007
Posted by dorigo in food, personal.5 comments
Today’s talks at the Outstanding Questions in Cosmology conference left me quite exhausted, after ten hours in the conference room spent trying to make sense of complex talks on a subject unfamiliar to me, and blogging about them. So I went back to my hotel, had a shower, put on more casual clothing, and went out to explore London’s night life.
A taxi brought me from High Street Kensington to Piccadilly. It was an experiment, and it failed. I wanted to see if it was a reasonable alternative to the tube or the bus these days, but I found out it is a bit too expensive, especially during rush hour. Anyway, I wanted to discuss something else here.
Wandering around in Soho, a few drinks past what’s advisable, I stopped at a nice little restaurant, which eventually provided me with a filet mignon, a half-bottle of Sauvignon Blanc from Chile, and a creme brulee.
The food was good, but the wine was -surprisingly- just as good if not better. I am now feeling sorry for not having taken a note of the name on the bottle… I am not a real expert with wine, but I have gotten to the point where I can tell you with a sip if a white wine is worth more, less, or about 10 euro at retail. Which is more or less what I need to know.
And I do not want to get any better in my wine-tasting capabilities: if I did, I would certainly end up escalating to appreciating only more expensive wines, and I would have little more to enjoy if not the thrill of drinking down a full week of salary during a happy evening. No, I think I got to the point where I would become concerned with details too subtle to tell if I learned more. So it is actually ok if I did not take a note of the name of that good Chilean Sauvignon.
The miserable near future of Cosmology March 27, 2007
Posted by dorigo in Blogroll, astronomy, news, physics, science.14 comments
I have no energy nor time to discuss yesterday’s talks in any detail, so I decided I’d skip them and pretend they did not happen, and use today’s lunch break for giving some highlights about the things I heard this morning. As previous ones on the same topic, this post is a bit more technical than I would like it to be, so be patient with me. I have a hard time understanding everything myself…
PS: the title of this post comes from the talk of Lawrence Krauss, see below.
- Shaun Cole talked on “Galaxy and Mass Power Spectra“. He asked himself the question: do uncertainties in modeling non-linearity and galaxy bias compromise constraints on cosmological parameters coming from measurements of the galaxy power spectrum? And he went on to discuss it by analyzing data from 2dF and SDSS, surveys of galaxy distributions in the universe which have small overlap and different sensitivities. Biases come from the Sloan survey’s higher sensitivity to red galaxies, which has to be taken into account, and their non-fixed magnitude limit. It seems that at large distance scales the Sloan survey finds less power in the spectrum, which implies a slightly higher value of the matter fraction of the matter-energy budget of the universe than current best estimates - although within uncertainties things agree. At small scales, blue galaxies are less clustered than red galaxies, but if one takes the color bias away and compares the two surveys, results agree better.
- Douglas Scott (above) talked about “The Standard Model of Cosmology versus the Other One“. He compared the model of Cosmology to the model of Particle Physics, and tried to gain some insights in what is in store for cosmology. (more…)
Conference dinner and A Miserable Future March 27, 2007
Posted by dorigo in astronomy, humor, science, social life.4 comments
Yesterday evening the conference banquet was served at 170, Queen’s Gate. Of the almost 140 names listed in the participants list, only 45 or so could attend the event due to space limitations - but in the end there were a few empty seats nonetheless. However, the dinner was good, the atmosphere cheerful, the venue was charming, and wine ran aplenty.
Below are a few pictures of the tables. You might recognize a few faces - I will not attach names to them, but only mention that you can spot a fellow blogger in one of them, as well as institutional figures like Tom Kibble.
After the dinner, we were treated by a nice presentation by Lawrence Krauss, titled “A Miserable Future“. Lawrence cheered us up by explaining that since everything is receding from us at the speed of light, cosmology will become impossible to do in the near future, due to lack of any chance of exploring anything beyond the local group of galaxies.
His talk was full of humor and wit, as when he discussed anthropic reasoning, claiming that there are different ways of applying it. One of them, shown below, dictates that we live in just the right universe that allowed Queen Elizabeth:
In a few minutes his real talk will start… I should stop blogging and concentrate on the real thing now.
