A Day at DIAS
Last night I flew back to Ireland for a few days of work here before the Easter Weekend. The schedule of flights from Cardiff to Dublin has changed for the spring, with the afternoon flight much later: at 7.45pm instead of 3.40pm, so I left from Cardiff after work on Monday and had dinner in the airport (an overpriced and barely edible beefburger).
Although there is no teaching in either on Maynooth or Cardiff this week I had to come to Ireland for a few reasons, including giving a seminar today at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS) this afternoon which provided me with the chance to visit it for the first time.
It being a pleasant morning I walked to DIAS from Connolly Station after taking the train there from Maynooth. It’s about half an hour’s walk.
DIAS is actually spread over several sites. Officially my talk was at the School of Theoretical Physics, but there were some people there from the School of Cosmic Physics, which is located not too far away. There were also a few people from Maynooth there, as there are a number of collaborations going on between the two institutions involving staff and students. There was also a visitor from even further afield, in the form of Cormac O’Rafferty who also visits this blog from time to time.
Anyway I had a nice curry for lunch before the talk, which generated a lot of questions from which I infer that it was either confusing or stimulating (or possibly both). Here are the slides in case anyone feels like taking a look.
For a change I decided to take the train back to Maynooth from Pearse rather than Connolly, but as it was rush hour I found it packed.
Maynooth by contrast is very quiet with most students away for the break. I can also report that the annoying roadworks that have been going outside my Maynooth residence for months have now finished.
Anyway, thanks to my hosts at DIAS for inviting me and I hope my talk was reasonably bearable. Hopefully this will be the first visit of many!
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In the Dark 
March 27, 2018 at 8:00 pm
Great talk Peter, everybody really enjoyed it! I notice the best talks always have a general introduction before getting to the technical topic of the day, much appreciated. Re DIAS, yes they have a network of Research Associates, which allows physicists from all over the country to use the excellent library etc. In the teaching hols, I spend as much time at DIAS as I do in my own college.
March 27, 2018 at 8:06 pm
How does one get to become a Research Associate? Asking for a friend… 😉
March 27, 2018 at 8:36 pm
If I remember correctly, you just send a request to one of the Professors, and then it gets approved by the Board. It’s not an elite club, the idea is to strengthen links between physicists in different colleges
March 27, 2018 at 8:39 pm
By the way, I meant to ask at question time:
I seem to remember that Schroedinger did some work on cosmology at DIAS in the 1950s, where he applied wave mechanics to the universe as a whole. But I don’r remember if he looked at structure formation….probably not, I guess
March 27, 2018 at 9:43 pm
Not that I’m aware of. I think he dealt only with homogeneous models.
March 28, 2018 at 10:50 am
Another thing struck me after the talk. It’s well known that Einstein’s suggestion to Lemaitre in the early 1930s to look at the effect of inhomogeneity on expanding models led to the first models of structure formation. I think that constitutes more evidence that AE saw his static model as a blunder in retrospect (not just invalidated by Hubble’s observations). After all, inhomogeneities were inevitable for galaxies to form, therefore it was a mistake not to consider the stability of the model against such effects in 1917…
March 28, 2018 at 2:52 pm
Who are the nearest sources to the conversations?
March 28, 2018 at 3:51 pm
There’s a big difference between perturbing the global density while keeping a homogeneous universe and introducing local density fluctuations…