No time for substantive blogging, as today is the Open House for prospective grad students in both Physics and Astronomy and Astrophysics here at UofC. My duty is to convince everyone that this is the best place in the world, which fortunately isn’t such a hard sell.
I do find myself explaining that my own trajectory is not a good role model. I’m one of the few physics professors you’ll find without any degrees in physics (I was in Astronomy departments for both undergrad and grad school). In my day (late 80’s, early 90’s), it wasn’t clear where to specialize if you were interested in particle physics and/or cosmology — there weren’t any specialties that were especially lively. Now there are too many — inflation and its connections to the CMB and large-scale structure, dark matter theory and experiment, dark energy theory and experiment, ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, galaxy clusters and the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect, accelerator-based particle physics, numerical relativity and field theory, particle phenomenology, string theory and cosmology, pure string theory, gravitational-wave astrophysics, and a couple dozen areas outside the realm of field theory and cosmology. All of these areas are more exciting than they were fifteen years ago. Kids today don’t know how good they have it.