Fridays are the good days at Flatiron. We have the Astronomical Data Group internal meeting (which operates by extremely odd and clever rules, not designed nor enforced by me) and the new Dynamics Group internal meeting. In the latter Robyn Sanderson (Penn) brought her entire group from Penn. Students working with the ESA Gaia data. One thing the group is finding is that certain stars have dynamics that are far more sensitive to dynamical (potential) parameters than others. This is something that Bovy and I were arguing long ago: The dynamical model of the Milky Way will not rest equally on all Gaia stars: Some will be critical. That's either obvious or deep. Or both! (I'm loving that phrase these days.)
Late in the day, Rodrigo Luger (Flatiron) and I trapped Leslie Greengard (Flatiron) and Alex Barnett (Flatiron) into a conversation about performing line integrals of spherical harmonics along curves that are themselves solutions of spherical-harmonic equations. In a typical astronomy–math interaction, we spent most of our time describing the problem, and then the answer is either: That's trivial! or That's hard! Unfortunately the answer wasn't That's trivial! But they did give us some good ideas for how to think about the problem.
One funny thing Greengard asked, which resonated with me (no pun intended): He said: Can you convert this math question into a physics question? Because if you can, it probably has a simple answer! You see how odd that is? That if your equation represents a physics problem, it is probably simple to solve. And yet it seems like it is exactly right. That's either deep or wrong or scary. I think maybe the latter.
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