Author Archives: Michelle Knights

The Famelab Experience

Posted on May 21, 2013

Gazing out at the crowd of 960 people, mostly teenagers, the thought occurred to me that standing alone on a big stage, attempting to entertain such a large crowd of people with science might not be everyone’s cup of tea. … Continue reading →

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Is the Cosmological Coincidence a Problem? – Seminar by Navin Sivanandam

Posted on April 4, 2012

Last week, we enjoyed a seminar by Dr. Navin Sivanandam, a postdoc at AIMS, about his latest paper. Navin’s surprising answer to the above question is no, the cosmological coincidence is not something we should concern ourselves with. He uses … Continue reading →

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SN Ia Rate in Intermediate-Redshift Galaxy Clusters – Seminar by Eli Kasai

Posted on December 7, 2011

This week, Eli Kasai gave us a short talk about the work he is doing for his masters project with NASSP. He is using image subtraction to find type 1a supernovae to learn more about supernovae rates in galaxy clusters. … Continue reading →

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String Theory and Nonplanar AdS/CFT – Public Talk and Seminar by Robert de Mello Koch

Posted on December 7, 2011

On Tuesday the 15th, Robert de Mello Koch graced the AIMS/Science Out Loud scene with his public talk entitled “From Spacetime and Quantum Mechanics to String Theory”. In his brilliant overview of string theory, in which important props such as … Continue reading →

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Non-gaussianities in Multifield Inflation: The approach to adiabaticity and the Fate of fnl – Seminar by Navin Sivanandam

Posted on December 7, 2011

This week, we had the pleasure of receiving a seminar by Navin Sivanandam, the new post-doc at AIMS. Navin presented his recent work with Joel Meyers, found  in the papers  1011.4934 and 1104.5238. Navin first overviewed the basics of inflation. … Continue reading →

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Recent results from the Herschel-ATLAS – Seminar by Matt Jarvis

Posted on October 19, 2011

This week, Matt Jarvis (from the University of the Western Cape and the University of Hertfordshire) brought us up to speed on the latest results from Herschel, the infrared space telescope launched by ESA in 2009. Matt reminded us of … Continue reading →

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Falsifying Paradigms for Cosmic Acceleration – Seminar by Dragan Huterer

Posted on May 20, 2011

Dragan Huterer, from the University of Michigan, gave us a very entertaining talk that stimulated much discussion about how to falsify entire paradigms of dark energy rather than just specific models of dark energy. In their recent paper Mortonson, Hu … Continue reading →

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Attempts at Solving the Coincidence Problem – seminar by Marina Cortês

Posted on May 13, 2011

In this excellent seminar, Marina told us about her group’s attempt to solve the coincidence problem of dark energy by allowing for multiple phases of acceleration. The coincidence problem is that it seems we live in a special time where … Continue reading →

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Recent advances in Bayesian cosmological model building – colloquium by Roberto Trotta

Posted on April 20, 2011

On the 30th of March, AIMS hosted the second seminar of the Joint Western Cape Astronomy/Cosmology Seminar series, which was a talk by Roberto Trotta on Bayesian cosmological model building. Roberto began by introducing the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) … Continue reading →

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Testing the equivalence principle with fundamental constants – seminar by Jean-Phillipe Uzan

Posted on April 4, 2011

This March seminar was about the strange concept of “varying constants” or more specifically, how these constants can help us test the equivalence principle. Jean-Phillipe started by explaining what a fundamental constant is and how, in order to allow them … Continue reading →

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Exact non-linear homogeneities in ΛCDM cosmology – seminar by Niko Meures

Posted on March 11, 2011

Last Monday, at another of our popular seminars, Niko Meures (ICG, Portsmouth) gave us an intriguing talk on the topic of non-linear inhomogeneities in LCDM cosmology. His work involves looking at exact solutions to the Einstein Field Equations which allow … Continue reading →

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The Problem of Averaging in Cosmology – seminar by Tim Clifton

Posted on February 24, 2011

This week our speaker, Tim Clifton of CERN and Oxford, took us through the difficult problem of averaging in cosmology. Tim presented the various current methods of averaging, pointing out some problems with them such as the dependence of averaged … Continue reading →

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