The Mixcloud embed isn’t working at the moment, so you can find the audio here. (WordPress is a fickle, but free, beast.)

This was a weird thing for me to do – interview a cosmologist – because I’m a cosmologist. I tried to ask her questions to get her to explain what we do and why we do it. For your perusal, this is part 1 of out interview:

Extra links:

• Dr. Renée’s Hlozek’s website.
• The Death of the Universe animated TED special (I highly recommend).

• Doppler effect demonstration:

http://www.esa.int/spaceinvideos/content/view/embedjw/437383

• .Astronomy conference
  • Distance measurements in astronomy:
    • Some general stuff
    • Type 1a supernovae standard candles, specifically
  • Excellent NASA article on dark matter and dark energy
  • Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), standard Big Bang Picture
    • The most recent satellite, Planck, and the CMB
  • Polarization of light, polarization of the CMB
    • Intermediate level explanation (Wayne Hu, U. of Chicago)

^^ Polarization of the CMB from the BICEP2 results last year (primarily due to the CMB light filtering through dust in our galaxy before it reaches out telescopes).

• The Atacama Cosmology Telescope:

• SPIDER experiment