A week ago I was at the New Views of the Universe symposium in Chicago. I promised to give a more complete report, and so here goes. This meeting was held to inaugurate the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago. The institute itself has really been around for four years now, as one of the first Physics Frontier Centers funded by the National Science Foundation. In fact, I went to another symposium back in 2001 to inaugurate that. The latest incarnation is due to new funding from the Kavli Foundation (specifically, from Fred Kavli), which will help make this a permanent institute. I arrived on Saturday morning, checked in to the Hyatt Regency, where the whole conference was held, and headed down to the plenary sessions, which had already started. I was surprised to walk into the conference room at the beginning of Sean's talk on "Dark Energy, or Worse?". As it turned out, Lisa Randall, who was supposed to speak on the first day, had been delayed and so Sean's talk had been moved up by one day. Sean did a great job, as usual, laying out the primary approaches to the enigma of cosmic acceleration and discussing their implications. He spent quite a bit of time on modifications to gravity, on which we have worked quite a bit, and reported, among other things, on some recent work that he's been doing in part with me, with his graduate student Iggy Sawicki, and my graduate student, Alessandra Silvestri. I won't go into this here, but promise a full report when the paper is completed, in about a month (hopefully). There were some other very nice plenary talks that day, but to be honest, I either couldn't concentrate enough to appreciate them, or skipped them to get a little sleep. I had been coming down with a cold for a few days and just hadn't had enough sleep because of this, coupled with a very early flight. I managed to catch up on sufficient sleep that afternoon that I was livelier in the evening, when I went to a wonderful dinner with Sean, Amber Miller and Sean's friend Gretchen Helfrich (the link is from before her excellent show was cancelled), and then on to Andy's Jazz Club to listen to Von Freeman play. This turned out to be a great night. We were joined at Andy's by our very own Risa, Lisa Randall, Alice Shapley, Julianne Dalcanton and Chris Cardall. It seemed worth trying out the camera on my phone to capture such a fun evening, but the results were less than encouraging, except for this rather atmospheric shot of Lisa, with Amber Miller blurred-out on the left, and Von Freeman on stage in the background.
The man himself was in great form, even scatting with a friend of his for about twenty minutes at one point. He came over and held court at our table for a while - telling some stories and generally being charming and hilarious. The parallel talks the next morning were fun. I particularly enjoyed Janet Conrad's talk, as I usually do, in which she discussed the current status and future prospects of neutrino experiments. In the afternoon I split my time between the parallel session on Dark Matter and the one on the CMB. In the CMB session, Dragan Huterer gave a nice summary of work with Dominik Schwarz, Glenn Starkman and Craig Copi on some puzzling features of the CMB power spectrum at large angles. The fact that there is a lack of power on large scales (although entirely consistent with cosmic variance) is well known. What is perhaps not so widely discussed is that two of the lowest multipoles - the quadrupole and octopole - are tightly correlated in the sense that the quadrupole plane and the three octopole planes are aligned. That the alignments correlate with either the ecliptic or the cosmological dipole may ultimately turn out to be particularly telling. Dragan discussed how they extract this from the WMAP data and commented on possible explanations. I have questions about whether one can take seriously results obtained from the full-sky WMAP maps, since one should worry about contamination from the galactic plane. However, these are smart guys and they claim to have worried about this. In the Dark Matter session, Anne Green (who I discovered is the puppet master behind Ed Copeland's recent post suggestions) gave a very nice talk on how the detailed microphysics of dark matter can affect the way in which the first dark matter halos form and, in turn, influence the distribution of dark matter on subgalactic scales. Sunday night we had the conference banquet, held at the Adler Planetarium. It was a perfectly nice time and, for the first time, I got to hear Fred Kavli speak. For me though, the highlight was a short speech by Don Randel, the outgoing President of the University of Chicago, who gave an eloquent, spirited and heartfelt rallying call for people to help defend against the attacks on science that have occurred over the last few years and about which we have posted often. The first talk on Monday was by Julianne Dalcanton. I was very glad that I got up to see this talk. Julianne described her talk as "Galaxy Formation 101". This might have been true, but it was a great level for me and I actually learned a great deal. Plus, she had some hilarious slides in which puppets were doing twisted things. I'd love to have a picture of them here, but I couldn't find them. Maybe Julianne will read this and provide an example. I took some time on Monday to have lunch with Sean and Iggy to make some progress on our joint project, and then later had a nice dinner and some drinks with Sean, Dan Holz (who I've mentioned before), Isobel Hook (who I met for the first time at this conference), Ruth Gregory and Ed Copeland. I don't get to see Ruth and Ed very often, so it was particularly nice to spend some time with them. I learned a lot during the New Views conference. It provided a useful summary of the current status of most of the major subfields within cosmology, and the talks were excellent. Some people have reputations for giving great talks, and those people lived up to their reputations. More importantly, some people have reputations for giving not particularly great talks, but at this conference I thought even those people gave very good talks (obviously I won't be naming names here). One thing I like to point out when I report on conferences is how collegial they are. I think many people think of scientists as a dry bunch, who occasionally get together, stiffly shake hands and rub tweed jackets for a while in front of the blackboard. It is important for people to realize that one makes good friends from all over the world in this business. Conferences are great opportunities to learn new results, develop new collaborations and exchange ideas. But they are also wonderful fun and a chance to spend time with friends. This is one of the great perks of being a physicist.
