Conference dinner and A Miserable Future March 27, 2007
Posted by dorigo in astronomy, humor, science, social life.trackback
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.
[...] Tommaso Dorigo has a photo of Lawrence Krauss’s amusing graphic articulating this problem in his talk at an alternative cosmology conference. [...]
[...] was at the cosmology conference that Tommaso Dorigo has been reporting on, giving a dinner talk dissing anthropic reasoning and pointing out that cosmology has a “miserable future”, [...]
[...] much time left before pencils start to vanish… If that were so, Krauss’ worries about the miserable future of Cosmology would have been far too optimistic (and he in fact denied being a pessimist during the question [...]
Good and perfect.
Precious work.