Preposterous Universe

 
Geneve

Greetings from Geneva, world center of banking, watches, and high-energy physics. (Three fields of endeavor which, not coincidentally, each place a premium on exquisite precision.) I'm at CERN for the week, giving a set of academic lectures on "Cosmology for Particle Physicists." (Wow, I just gave the first lecture a couple of hours ago, and the video is already up! Welcome to Switzerland.) Here are the slides as html and a 1.2M pdf file. Nothing you haven't seen before, in the likely event that you've been reading all of my talks as I put them on the web.

Four more lectures to come, slightly more detailed and technical than the introductory gee-whiz first lecture: 1. Dark matter and dark energy; 2. Thermodynamics in the early universe; 3. Perturbations and large-scale structure; 4. Inflation and beyond. Also unlike the first lecture, these will be on the blackboard instead of from some pretty computer presentation. Because I'm hard core, baby.

If I weren't tired from jet lag and facing four more lectures to write, I'd regale you with witty anecdotes from the plane trip here. Like, how I couldn't get past level 18 of the Caveman video game that Swissair provides to keep you from getting any sleep at all during the flight. Those damn red mammoths kept catching me.

~ posted by Sean Carroll at 8:56 AM ~ link ~ ~ ~