listening at Toronto Physics

I spent the day today at CITA and UofT Physics in Toronto. The CITA Seminar was given by Alexander van Engelen (CITA), who spoke about the things we can learn from the CMB in the near future. He emphasized that there are still interesting things to learn about the primary CMB, which violates some beliefs I held prior to the talk! But he also put a lot of emphasis on the lensing or convergence map, which can be combined with other tracers to do a lot of science.

I had so many great conversations and discussions, too many to describe! But some highlights included the following: I chatted with Patrick Breysse (CITA) about testing cross-correlations and self-calibration for line-intensity mapping experiments with toy models. He has some nice ideas there. I chatted with visitor Deyan Mihaylov (Cambridge) about the possibility that Gaia might detect gravitational radiation! Bart Netterfield (Toronto) talked about very precisely pointed balloon-born optical telescope experiments. And Chris Thompson (CITA) had all sorts of crazy ideas about what might cause the fast radio bursts. His principal ideas involve cosmic strings and black holes!

I gave the UofT Physics Colloquium. I spoke about how Gaia and other kinematic surveys can measure the dark matter. I talked about the results that Ana Bonaca (Harvard) and Adrian Price-Whelan (Princeton) and Charlie Conroy (Harvard) and I will have on the arXiv on Monday!