I gave a lecture to secondary school teachers this week as part of the Goldsmith’s Company’s Science for Society Course on astrophysics. Having heard about the Big Bang model and some of its problems from my colleague Dr David Mulryne, I was given the task of outlining how the inflationary paradigm tries to solve these problems and some of the reasons we think it is a good model of the early universe.

Yesterday I gave my first seminar as a postdoc in the regular Relativity and Cosmology series at QMUL. People seemed to engage with the material and there were quite a few questions at the end. The slides for the talk are available as a pdf or through the embedded widget below. My style for talks is heavily skewed towards minimalist slides with lots of verbal explanation so without having me beside you to guide you through them they might be hard to understand.

The Cosmo09 conference took place last week in the picturesque surroundings of CERN with lots of talks, a lot of conversation and not a little French/Swiss beer. Videos of the plenary talks are now available and the slides of every talk (including the parallel sessions) are listed in the conference programme for each session. There are a few personal notes on the sessions in the FriendFeed group. My talk was on Thursday afternoon in the inflation session.