Interviewing Katherine Freese: Dark Matter, Inflation and Star Trek
Last thursday we took the chance to interview Katherine Freese, who visited the Faculty of Physics and gave a speech in the Sala Darwin about her work. She is a theoretical physicist and a George Eugene Uhlenbeck Collegiate Professor of Physics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She is known for her work in particle physics and astrophysics. Freese was one of the first to suggest ways of discovering dark matter, and her work decisively ruled out MACHO dark matter in favor of WIMPs. She developed an original model known as "Cardassian expansion", in which dark energy is replaced with a modification of Einstein's equations. She has also worked on the beginnings of the Universe, searching for new successful inflationary theories, and even studied the ultimate fate of life in the Universe. When did you decide to investigate in your field and why? There are many pieces to this question. My parents we...