Astrophysics Goes Extreme

You would­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly guess it, but astro­physics comes with occu­pa­tion­al risks. Try­ing to unrav­el the mys­ter­ies of the uni­verse, some physi­cists jour­ney to inhos­pitable parts of the world (Siberia, the Antarc­tic, deep mine shafts, etc.), search­ing for ide­al con­di­tions to per­form exper­i­ments into dark ener­gy, dark mat­ter, and beyond. This all gets detailed by Anil Anan­thaswamy, a soft­ware writer turned sci­ence writer, who recent­ly pub­lished a new book The Edge of Physics: A Jour­ney to Earth­’s Extremes to Unlock the Secrets of the Uni­verse. The talk above was pre­sent­ed at the INK Con­fer­ence last Decem­ber. You can also watch him give a fuller 50 minute talk at Google here.