The Niels Bohr Institute is hosting a conference this week on New Ideas in Cosmology. I’m no cosmologist, but it’s a pretty cool field, so as a local I’ve been sitting in on some of the talks. So far they’ve had a selection of really interesting speakers with quite a variety of interests, including a talk by Roger Penrose with his trademark hand-stippled drawings.
One thing that has impressed me has been the “interdisciplinary” feel of the conference. By all rights this should be one “discipline”, cosmology. But in practice, each speaker came at the subject from a different direction. They all had a shared core of knowledge, common models of the universe they all compare to. But the knowledge they brought to the subject varied: some had deep knowledge of the mathematics of gravity, others worked with string theory, or particle physics, or numerical simulations. Each talk, aware of the varied audience, was a bit “colloquium-style“, introducing a framework before diving in to the latest research. Each speaker knew enough to talk to the others, but not so much that they couldn’t learn from them. It’s been unexpectedly refreshing, a real interdisciplinary conference done right.
4 gravitons 
Was there any suggestion ( or update) about the ” crisis” with the discrepancies between different estimations for the Hubble parameter? Or the talks were merely about theoretical cosmological models..
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I missed some of the talks, so I don’t know if it came up more. Most of the talks focused on “bigger problems”: how to avoid inflation, or get dS out of string theory. One of the talks did mention that primordial magnetic fields can help with the Hubble discrepancy.
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Thanks!
The interpretation of the entropy of the deSitter cosmological horizon ( and its relation with holography) is another interesting ( and, perhaps, controversial) subject.
Hopefully, videos from these talks will be on YT, soon.
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This was a pretty small conference, I’m 90% sure the talks were not recorded.
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