Empirically testing for clandestine telepathy

Research question: Do telepathic powers exist? Such powers would be highly in demand, so highly in fact that telepaths might become paranoid and keep their abilities secret. Here, I propose a method to identify hidden telepaths.

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A Beginner’s Guide to Cosmological Speculation

Another video of one of my talks. The goal is to take Bayesian probability theory as it is used in the physical sciences and see if it can make sense of postulating and testing a multiverse theory.

As part of a project called Establishing the Philosophy of Cosmology, I attended a conference in Tenerife, Spain in September last year. The line-up of fellow attendees was, frankly, intimidating. Nevertheless, I had a wonderful time, learned a lot and presented some of my own ideas towards the end of the conference.

The videos are now available on YouTube here; talk slides are here. Just about all the talks are worth a listen – I’ve been enjoying listening to them again. Here are a few highlights.

Joel Primack – Cosmological Structure Formation. A nice introduction to how the universe made its galaxies.

Barry Loewer – Metaphysics of Laws & Time in Cosmology. A very helpful talk on how to think about the laws of nature, and the place of probabilities therein.

George Ellis – Observability and Testability in cosmology and Cosmology: what are the Limits of Science. Made an important distinction between “big-C” Cosmology, whose purview is all of reality, and “little-c” cosmology, which is a branch of science about what physics and physical observations can say about the universe as a whole.

Sean Carroll – What Happens Inside the Wave Function? (I’ll let Sean explain here.)

The talks by Don Page, Bob Wald, Jim Hartle, Joe Silk, David Wallace, David Albert, Chris Smeenk, Brian Pitts, Tom Banks, and Jean-Philippe Uzan were very interesting, as were the discussion panels of Dean Zimmerman, Jennan Ismael & Tim Maudlin, and Janna Levin, Priya Natarajan, Claus Beisbart & Pedro Ferreira.

Here’s mine.  Enjoy.

(My sister is a TV journalist. I’m going to have to get some tips about not fidgeting, what to do with my hands, and not flubbing my words. I say “quantise” instead of “quantify” at one point. *cringe* My good wife has seen me give public lectures, and has commented that I appear to be on speed.)

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My New Project – Galaxy Formation and the Multiverse

I’ve started a new project at the University of Sydney. I’m still at the same desk, but I’ll be doing something a bit different. More details soon, but basically I’ll be using cosmological simulations of galaxy formation to try to make precise the connection between the fundamental parameters of cosmology – like the density of matter, the lumpiness of the early universe and the cosmological constant – and the conditions required by stars, and hence anything that requires stars.

For a brief overview of why anyone would do this, here’s a short presentation I gave at the Australian Academy of Science’s “Australian Frontiers of Science – The edges of astronomy” meeting in December 2014. My talk starts at 25:09. I think it’s queued up below. The other talks are also well worth your time:

The edge of the Universe—a fundamental limit how much we can know? – Associate Professor Tamara Davis
The small-scale spatial limits to the Universe – Dr Alessandro Fedrizzi
The edges of knowledge —the ‘physics is done’ syndrome – Associate Professor Michael Murphy

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