A Day in the Life of a Theoretical Physicist
So much running around my head. Especially this Wayne Shorter melody from a Miles Davis song. The other day a colleague ramarked that "Everybody knows that you went to Jamaica" I was left to interpret that as "We are fully aware that you were hanging out at the beach in Jamaica when you should have been doing physics. . ." Perhaps I'll ask my colleague next week what they really meant by that. But I could not help but reflect on that statement. The first thing was that I was in Trinidad and Tobago visiting the University of the West Indies where I gave two talks- one technical and one general overview of contemporary observational issues in cosmology. It was exciting for me to visit UWI since they are in the middle of building a radio telescope and have recently made new hires in Astrophysics.
Now you may recall that I was born in Trinidad and have always dreamt of participating in science in the West Indies and South America. I was a bit taken aback by my colleagues remarks (but I must admit that I may have simply overreacted) since no one makes similar remarks when someone goes to Austrailia or the Greek Islands or any warm beautiful place to give a talk or collaborate. So why do we think that Jamaica or Trinidad should be any less? After all, there are three Nobel Laureates active and living in the Caribbean (In fact I met one when during my recent trip). Well the best way to deal with these things is to envoke an honest and non-accusatory dialogue. What do you think?
Recently there was this well written paper by Kate Land and Joao Magueijo at Imperial College doing some really cool statistical analysis on the observed low CMB quadrapole. They show with 95% confidence that this is a signature of Parity violation (reflection parity). This is very interesting to me since, the baryogenesis model that I helped develop recently is exactly due to a large scale reflection parity violation in the gravity wave power spectrum. I'm thinking very hard and am in the process of setting up some preliminary calculations to test my hunch. This will be remarkable if the baryogenesis mechanism can be directly detectable in the CMB in this manner. More on this later-I'll just keep you in suspense.
