I returned a week ago from a few days at Penn State University, where I was chairing and speaking in the session on cosmology at the Inaugural Conference of the Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos. This was a delightful trip for a number of reasons, not least because I could drive there rather than dealing with the increasing difficulties posed by flying. Driving also meant that it was easy to take along a couple of my graduate students – Alessandra Silvestri and Michele Fontanini.

The conference took place Thursday through Saturday and my duties were all on Thursday afternoon, meaning that the rest of the meeting was free for me to focus on what others had to say and take advantage of chances for some individual physics discussions. There were some excellent talks, with particularly nice ones, in my opinion, from Joe Polchinski (The Black Hole Information Paradox), Slava Mukhanov (The Origin of the Big Bang: Inflation After WMAP) and Frans Pretorius (Black Hole Collisions).

Slava is a master of these kinds of talks and even on topics I’m supposed to know a lot about, I always find I learn something new from him, although we did disagree about the importance of fine tuning in whatever microphysical theory underlies inflation. In his talk Joe expressed his personal opinion that the information loss paradox is now solved within string theory, although the audience did not universally share this view, and he faced some polite questioning from Institute Director Abhay Ashtekar.

Another plenary talk was delivered by Roger Penrose, who discussed what he described as “a crazy idea” to address the cosmological entropy problem in the context of cyclic universes. I did not follow the proposal entirely, but the session ran out of time before I could get a clarification.

The conference was not without some down time either, with an enjoyable banquet, after which I joined Deidre Shoemaker, Pablo Laguna, and several others to watch their colleague, my friend, and former Quantum Diaries contributor Stephon Alexander sit in as saxophonist with a jazz band playing at a local bar. Here he is, second from the right in this rather poor iPhone photo

Right now I’m supposed to be in Puebla, Mexico, delivering a set of lectures at the Dual C-P Institute of High Energy Physics workshop on SUSY and String Phenomenology. However, my travel schedule had no room for error in it, and due to bad weather all possible flights were canceled on Friday evening, guaranteeing that I would miss two out of my three talks and making my trip pointless. So I’m home cooking Mexican food to make myself feel better.

While I wish I’d been able to make this trip, there’s a lot to be said for not traveling these days, and right now I find myself in the extremely unusual position of having over five weeks without travel stretching ahead of me, before I go to California for some guy’s wedding and then off for a long trip to Australia. To offset this apparent freedom, however, our semester begins in one week!