Doing Fourier Transforms at Caltech

I'm in the middle of my trip to Caltech, which I am enjoying very much. Given that I'm discussing physics with people most of the day and then flying out, there isn't much time to post. I just had a nice chat with Mark Wise about the much-discussed Kolb, Matarrese, Notari and Riotto paper. I know Rocky and Toni quite well and am, in general, a big fan of their work. I haven't been able to understand this paper sufficiently well to have an opinion yet (see Sean Carroll's take on this over at Preposterous Universe), although I confess that the result goes against my intuition (wouldn't be the first time a correct result had managed this though).

For some reason, Mark and I tied ourselves in knots trying to compute the particular variance calculated in their paper, but, I am happy to report, we did succeed in doing the Fourier transform correctly at the end. Given the amount of interest in this paper (perhaps because of the press release), I'm going to have to work through it in much more detail and will report here after doing so (hopefully).

Back to Syracuse tonight so that I can teach tomorrow and host our seminar speaker, and my former collaborator, Brandon Carter - the man who coined the phrase "the anthropic principle". Now there's a topic begging to be blogged about.