Not Your Grandfather’s Gravity – 3rd time is the charm

I did this talk — basically interesting developments in gravity & related subjects — for the third time at Philcon this last Saturday.  The talk was scheduled for 1pm, so I spent a few hours in the morning refreshing it.

The big news was that the OPERA project had done a second version of the experiment that saw superluminal neutrinos, dealing with some of the objections (objectinos?) to their first results.  They sacrificed quantity of neutrinos to quality:  going from 16,000 to 20, but getting much tighter time resolution.   This made the New York Times Saturday morning, so I clipped the headline for use in a slide.  Good stuff, but of course everyone wants to see Fermilab & others reproduce the experimental results.

However the combination of refreshing the talk, roadwork on Interstate 76, & a parade or some such on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway meant I got in with no time to check the AV setup before the talk.  While the impromptu AV crew wrastled the difficulties into submission (thanks Margaret Trebling, Jay Wile, Ron Bushyager, & Ferne Welch!) I invited the audience to “open the theater of your mind” & painted word pictures thereon till the AV was working.  Didn’t take the crew long:  we hadn’t even gotten past the Black Death slide before we had light!  Actually I think the difficulties may have helped the talk go over; shared troubles create bonding between speaker & audience.  Lots of good questions; SRO crowd.

As I promised then, I have posted the talk as Keynote, PDF, PowerPoint, & HTML.  Comments, questions, and suggestions very welcome!

Had a lot of fun on the six panels I was on; will post on them over the next few days.

11/23/2011 I’ve just updated the references page to include the references from the talk.