Much excellent science today. I am creating a Monday-morning check-in and parallel working time session for the undergraduates I work with. We spoke about box-least-squares for exoplanet transit finding, about FM-radio demodulators and what they have to do with timing approaches to timing-based planet finding, scientific visualization and its value in communication, and software development for science.
At lunch, the Brown-Bag talk (my favorite hour of the week) was by two CCPP PhD students. Cedric Yu (NYU) spoke about the topological form of general relativity. As my loyal reader could possibly know, I love the reformulation of GR in which you take the square-root of the metric (the tetrad, in the business). Yu showed that if you augment this with some spin fields, you can reformulate GR entirely in terms of topological invariants! That's amazing and beautiful. It relates to some cool things relating geometry and topology in old-school math. Oliver Janssen (NYU) spoke about the wave function of the Universe, and what it might mean for the initial conditions. There is a sign ambiguity, apparently, in the argument of an exponential in the action! That's a big deal. But the ideas are interesting because they force thinking about how quantum mechanics relates to the entire Universe (and hence gravity).
In addition to all this, today was the first-ever meeting of the NYU Time Domain Astrophysics group meeting, which brings together a set of people at NYU working in the time domain. It is super diverse, because we have people working on exoplanets, asteroseismology, stellar explosions, stellar mergers, black-hole binaries, tidal disruption events, and more. We are hoping to use our collective wisdom and power to help each other and also influence the time-domain observing projects in which many of us are involved.
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