Skip to Content

Search: {{$root.lsaSearchQuery.q}}, Page {{$root.page}}

SPECIAL PUBLIC LECTURE<br>Cooking up Cosmology with the Dark Energy Detectives

  1. All News & Features
  2. All Events
    1. Archived Events
      1. 2013
      2. 2012
      3. 2011
      4. 2010
      5. 2009
      6. 2008
      7. 2007
      8. 2006
      9. 2005
      10. 2003
      11. 2002
      12. 2001
      13. 2000
      14. 1999
      15. HEP Astro
      16. Astronomy Colloquium
      17. Biophysics Seminar
      18. CM - AMO Seminars
      19. CM Theory Seminars
      20. Complex Systems
      21. Department Colloquia
      22. Quantitative Biology Seminars
      23. HET Brown Bag Series
      24. HET Seminars
      25. Life After Grad School Seminars
      26. Farrand Memorial Lecture
      27. Workshops & Conferences
      28. Miscellaneous
        1. Ralph Baldwin Prize in Astrophysics and Space Science: Accreting Black Holes: Blasts from the Past
        2. PHYSICS 391 OPEN HOUSE CELEBRATION: Introduction to Modern Physics Laboratory
        3. COLLEGIATE PROFESSORSHIP INAUGURAL LECTURE: Heat Rises: 100 Years of Rayleigh-Bénard Convection
        4. CANCELLED Due to Travel Issues from East Coast Blizzard! ASTRONOMY COLLOQUIUM: Global Radiation MHD Simulations of Black Hole Accretion Disks
        5. MICHIGAN THEATER SCIENCE ON SCREEN: Physicist Tim Chupp Presents After Documentary
        6. <b>ICAM EMERGENCE SYMPOSIUM 2015</b><Br>Emergence: Compelling Examples and Unifying Approaches
        7. <b>SPECIAL SEMINAR</b><Br>Electrically Controlled Quibits in Silicon
        8. <b>SPECIAL COSMOLOGY SEMINAR</b><br>Testing Gravity Using Galaxy Redshift Surveys and CMB
        9. <b>COSMOLOGY - ASTROPHYSICS SEMINAR</b><br>Evading Non-Linearities: Baryon Acoustic Oscillations at the Linear Point
        10. Cosmology - Asrophysics Seminar: Evading Non-Linearities: Baryon Acoustic Oscillations at the Linear Point (Wed, 14 Oct 2015)
        11. <b>COSMOLOGY - ASTROPHYSICS SEMINAR</b><br>Cosmic Microwave Background Power Asymmetry and Non-Gaussianity
        12. <b>SPECIAL COSMOLOGY SEMINAR</b><br>CMB Cosmology with ACT, Planck and ACTPol
        13. SPECIAL COSMOLOGY SEMINAR
        14. <b>SPECIAL PUBLIC LECTURE<br>From the Big Bang to the End of the Time: Scientific Creativity and the Limits of Knowledge</b>
        15. <b>DPF2015</b>
        16. <b>Strongly Correlated Topological Insulators: SmB6 and Beyond Conference</b>
        17. SPECIAL PUBLIC LECTURE<br>Cooking up Cosmology with the Dark Energy Detectives
        18. <i>Jeweled Net of the Vast Invisible:<br> an experience of dark matter</i><br>Live Performance and Preview
        19. DES @ Michigan Collaboration Meeting
        20. SPECIAL PUBLIC LECTURE<br>2015 Ralph B. Baldwin Award Lecture in Astrophysics and Space Sciences<br><b>Featuring: Physics Alumnus<br>Dr. Tomasz Biesiadzinski</b><br><i>Unbiasing Cosmological Surveys</i></b>
        21. <b>2015 Distinguished University Innovator Award<br><i>An Academic's Adventures in Business</i></b>
        22. ASTRONOMY MEETING<br>Compact Objects in Michigan
        23. ASTRONOMY<br>Undergraduate Poster Session
        24. Special Physics Related Event<br><i>Orbit Design</i> - Featuring Pre-Performance Talk by Professor Robert Savit</b>
        25. Dissertation Defense: Vibrational Probe and Methods Development for Studying the Ultrafast Dynamics of Preferential Solvation of Biomolecules by 2D-IR
        26. Watch Space Jam Movie, Post Movie Physics of Basketball and Cartoon Physics Talk with Professor Tim Chupp
        27. 2015 HENRY RUSSEL LECTURE<br>Featuring Professor Homer A. Neal<br><i>Beyond Sputnik: Challenges Facing America's National Science Policies</i>
        28. BIOCOMPLEXITY SEMINAR<br>Two Vignettes in Computational Neuroscience: From Data to Models
        29. 2015 APS CONFERENCE FOR UNDERGRADUATE WOMEN IN PHYSICS
        30. MCTP HET BROWN BAG <br> Renyi Entropy, Stationarity, and Entanglement of the Conformal Scalar
        31. BIOCOMPLEXITY SEMINAR<br>Network Analysis of Structure-Function Relationships in Neurobiology
        32. TA-YOU WU LECTURE IN PHYSICS<br>The Universe: Continuing Surprises
        33. BIOCOMPLEXITY SEMINAR <br> The Dynamics of Calcium: Oscillations and Waves, Experiments and Theory
        34. MIRA & MCTP Sponsored Presentation<br><i>Stars with Neutron Cores</i>
        35. Special MCTP Theory Seminar<br><i>A Twistor View of String Theory</i>
        36. SPECIAL CONDENSED MATTER SEMINAR<br>Topological Soft Matter: From Linkages to Kink
        37. 2014 Decentralization Conference
        38. 2014 Symposium on Radiation Measurements and Applications (SORMA XV)
        39. The Department of Physics Graduation and Awards Ceremony
        40. SPECIAL MCTP COLLOQUIUM<br>Groundbreaking Discovery of Gravitational Waves from Inflation in BICEP2 Cosmic Microwave Detector
        41. SPECIAL CONDENSED MATTER SEMINAR<br>Measurements of Superconductivity Instabilities in Multi-orbital Systems with Spin-orbit Coupling</br>
        42. HOMER NEAL SYMPOSIUM
        43. <i>Jeweled Net of the Vast Invisible: An Experience of Dark Matter</i>
        44. SPECIAL SCREENING OF <i>PARTICLE FEVER</i>
        45. PHYSICS RESEARCH POSTER SESSION
        46. SPECIAL SEMINAR<br>Successfully Publishing in Physics Review Letters/The Physical Review
        47. SPECIAL SEMINAR<br>Simulating Pre-biotic Proto-stellar Chemistry in the Age of ALMA: The Curious Case of Glycine</br>
        48. SPECIAL COSMOLOGY SEMINAR<br>Consistency Tests of Gravity Using Large Scale Structure Dynamics
      29. Saturday Morning Physics
      30. Special Lectures
      31. Search Events
  3. Special Lectures
  4. K-12 Programs
  5. Saturday Morning Physics
  6. Seminars & Colloquia
Thursday, May 14, 2015
4:00 AM
170 Dennison

Join us for an evening of wonder and laughter.  Learn step by step recipes - involving cheap and easy-to-find ingredients - for cosmos concoctions that will impress your friends, neighbors, and dinner party guests. Discover that the best physicists in the world, including many right here in your home town, have absolutely no clue as to why the Universe started to rip itself apart about a billion years ago.  Hear how the 300-strong international Dark Energy Survey collaboration (meeting this week in Ann Arbor) is using sensitive observations of the night sky, and several tens of millions of your tax dollars, to figure out what the heck is going on with our Universe.  Be surprised by the quantities of peculiarly flavored Chilean cookies and other specialties consumed in the process. And by the end of the night, you might get the notion that the Universe has been playing tricks on us, and that dark energy could be the ultimate case of the Emperor's New Clothes….

Dr. Kathy Romer (astronomy's answer to Nigella Lawson) got her Ph.D. in Edinburgh in 1995. She spent 9 years in the USA at Northwestern and Carnegie Mellon Universities before returning to the UK to join the University of Sussex Astronomy Centre. She works in the field of Observational Cosmology, with a particular specialism in the area of X-ray clusters of galaxies, and is a long-standing member of the Dark Energy Survey collaboration. Kathy is also an award winning teacher who is passionate about the public understanding of science.

Dr. Brian Nord (Guy Fieri-wanna be and afrophysicist) hails from Wisconsin and Florida. He learned physics at Johns Hopkins and Fermilab in the early 2000’s before earning his Ph.D. right here in Ann Arbor in 2010 by simulating large parts of the Universe. Now, he works at Fermilab on real data, specializing in strong gravitational lensing, spectroscopy and developing tools to plan future surveys. He also tries to time-lapse the stars from the Chilean Andes, so we can have a better look at our place in space-time. You’ll often find him at the local pub, poring over some code, reviewing a recent paper, or reading a comic book.

Dr.-minus-epsilon Rachel Wolf (aka The Barefoot Cosmologist) is from sunny Southern California. She received her bachelor's degree in Astrophysics from UCLA in 2011 and is currently in the fourth year of her Ph.D. work at the University of Pennsylvania.  Her primary research interest is observational cosmology, particularly studying Type Ia supernovae and their host galaxies. Rachel is also very passionate about science outreach; she's worked at the Griffith Observatory and Discovery Channel, and is involved in various other projects that inspire broad interest in science.

Sponsored by the U-M Department of Physics 
and 
Department of Energy Office of Science

Speaker:
Dr. Kathy Romer (University of Sussex), Dr. Brian Nord (Fermilab), and Ms. Rachel Wolf (Univ. of Penn.)