2018-09-27

how to write a discussion section

In a low-research day, a highlight was a long conversation with Bonaca (Harvard) about the writing of her paper on the GD-1 stream interaction. We discussed structure, and especially the discussion. In a discussion, I like a humble sandwich on proud bread: Start by saying what's most impressive about what we've done, then go into caveats, limitations, approximation wrongness, and the consequences of all that. And then end on a positive note about what kinds of great new things this work will enable going forward.

Late in the day, Alex Kusenko (UCLA, IPMU) spoke about a very wide range of subjects. He claims to have a full explanation for why we don't see the cutoff in the gamma-ray occurrence rate required by photon–photon interactions with the infrared background. He claims that the gamma rays we see from blazars are really reprocessed from cosmic rays. Plausible! But I would need to know a lot more. He also claims to have a way to naturally make primordial black holes in the end stages of inflation, and make all of the dark matter that way. That's interesting. Unfortunately it was such a long and tiring day I couldn't get it together to really check either of these ideas carefully.

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