Jim Peebles

Today was a celebration in Princeton for Jim Peebles (Princeton) and his 2019 Nobel Prize. As my loyal reader knows, I hate the Nobel Prize, and I say so in the slides from my talk. But I love Jim Peebles, who has been incredibly important to my career and life. I spoke about epistemology and large-scale structure.

In the other presentations during the day, Suzanne Staggs (Princeton) gave a deep and hilarious picture of the early days of CMB cosmology. Would she be upset to hear me call her early career the “early days” of CMB? Vicky Kaspi (McGill) showed an amazing result from the study of fast radio bursts: The rotation measures to the bursts increase with redshift in exactly the way you would expect from the cosmological baryon density and the world model in LCDM. That's incredible! Frans Pretorius (Princeton) gave a great talk about numerical relativity, in which he showed almost no numerical relativity computations! He talked about what might happen in the fully relativistic version of the black-hole-black-hole merger problem, in which the incoming black holes have their mass energies overwhelmed by the center-of-mass kinetic energies. He came up with many possible outcomes and explained why the answers aren't known. The answers involve incredibly qualitatively different outcomes!