CITA

I spent the day today at CITA, which is my childhood home: My first-ever scientific paper was written here (when I was an undergraduate researcher) with Scott Tremaine (now IAS) and Gerry Quinlan. At the CITA weekly grass-roots discussion of matters cosmological, Deyan Mihaylov (Cambridge) spoke about gravitational-wave detection with Gaia. He made an amazing point (which, like most amazing points, is obvious in retrospect): The GW signature in Gaia has an earth term but no “pulsar term”, in the language of pulsar timing. That is, it only depends on local metric perturbations! That is extremely good for scaling and precision.

In that same forum, I spoke for the first time ever about the correlation function estimators I have been developing with Kate Storey-Fisher (NYU). I spoke extemporaneously—it's a discussion forum—but I realized that we do have a great story to tell. It includes context from the Landy-Szalay estimator world and context from the linear-fitting world. Plus some information theory for spice! It is a great audience at CITA and they helped me sharpen my case well.

A highlight of a long day of conversations was a chat with Katie Breivik (CITA) about binary population synthesis. She is interested in predicting gravitational-wave sources. But the issues are general. We discussed what aspects of the theory are most weak, and where we might be able to patch in a data-driven replacement. That conversation is only just started, but it's something I want to bring home to NYC and think more about.