::RADICAL NEW APPROACHES::

Last night, I attended Sir Roger Penrose's talk at UTD entitled "Before the Big Bang: A Radical New Perspective." Imagine a fairly large auditorium, filled to the gills with geeks. Standing room only. About 50 people stood in the back through the whole lecture. Excellent.

I sat next to two septegenarian gentlemen; when one sat down, his friend said to him, "Bennie, I'm going to have to tell your wife you sat next to a pretty young lady!" Awww.


Now, I'm pretty smart. Some people might say that I'm really smart. I grok "light cones" and entropy. I laugh at the math jokes. But after about an hour, when Penrose started diagramming spacetime in these new shapes with squiggly/dashed/lined edges and filled/closed apeces, I was lost.