The highlight of my day was a wide-ranging conversation with Suroor Gandhi (NYU) about cosmology, career, and the world. She made a beautiful connection between a part of our conversation in which we were discussing the transparency of the Universe, and new ways to study that, and a part in which we were discussing the transparency with which the University speaks about disciplinary and rules cases, which (at NYU anyway) is not very good. Hence the title of this post. On transparency of the Universe, we discussed the fact that distant objects (quasars, say) do not appear blurry must put some limit on cosmic transparency. On transparency of the University, we discussed the question of how much do we care about the behavior of our institutions, and changing those behaviors. I'm a big believer in open science, open government, and open institutions.
I've been privileged these years to have some very thoughtful scientists in my world. Gandhi is one of them.
