I’m currently at the Philosophy of Cosmology Summer School at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I’ve been invited to speak for an afternoon on the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life. I’ve given such talks a number of times, but never with so many of the people whose work I am discussing actually sitting in the room. The line-up is very impressive:
Anthony Aguirre (UCSC), Craig Callender (UCSD), Sean Carroll (Cal Tech), Shelly Goldstein (Rutgers), Anna Ijjas (Harvard/Rutgers), Tim Maudlin (NYU), Priya Natarajan (Yale), Ward Struyve (Rutgers), Tiziana Vistarini, (Rutgers), David Wallace (Oxford), Alex Pruss, Chris Smeenk, Fred Adams, Leonard Susskind, Matt Johnson …
At the moment, Sean Carroll is holding forth on cosmology, time, initial conditions and such. The talks are being placed on YouTube fairly quickly, and I encourage you to have a look through the list of talks.
I’ll try to tweet some highlights – so follow me or watch the hashtag #PhilosophyCosmology.
Did you ask Matt Johnson about his bubble collision hunt? Stil waiting for a paper on the PLanck data:
http://www.earlyuniverse.org/simulating-cosmic-bubble-collisions-in-full-general-relativity/
He left before I got here. Apparently he presented that work in an earlier session, so check out the video: http://hipacc.ucsc.edu/IPC2013.html
Someone who was there said that he concluded in his talk that there was no evidence for bubble collisions in Planck.
Interesting, I’m curious as to why there are no papers on the arxiv yet. Even a null result deserve a paper. Maybe they are waiting for the polarisation data