FFP10, Day 1

The delegate from Rome adopted a rather liberal interpretation of the casual dress code.

My main reason for coming to Perth was to attend the FFP10 conference, or to give its full name, the Frontiers of Fundamental and Computational Physics. The event is hosted this year by the Physics Department of UWA. I had previously met the organiser, John Hartnett, at the CCC2 conference in Port Angeles, Washington, last year, and he had suggested attending FFP10 as he felt that people would be interested in the cosmological subject area that I tend to talk about.

This conference is a bit more mainstream than CCC, to the extent that there were two Physics Nobel Laureates at the event, as well as several distinguished invited speakers that I had heard of before. The other main difference was that the conference covered the complete spectrum of theoretical and experimental physics, as opposed to specializing purely in cosmology. This meant that many of the presentations were way outside my area of expertise, and much of it went over my head. However, the upside was that there were a few papers in obscure fields that discussed techniques or concepts that could apply to the sort of cosmology that I do.

The opening speaker on day 1 was Professor Gerard t'Hooft, who was awarded the Physics Nobel Prize in 199x for work he had done as a PhD student on quantum field theory. Happily, his talk was forward looking rather than being abut his past achievements, and he certainly had some interesting ideas about black holes and other aspects of general relativity. He was also an interesting guy to talk with in the coffee breaks.

In evening there was a public lecture by Prof Doug Oscheroff, another Physics Nobel Laureate. This time, the talk was explicitly about the process of making discoveries that lead to the Nobel Prize, and covered his work in discovering superfluidity in He3 (sorry about the techie stuff here). This was quite an entertaining session and he did manage to give some interesting insights about the element of luck that goes into some of these groundbreaking discoveries.