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Message: <blockquote data-quote="freyar" data-source="post: 6676455" data-attributes="member: 40227">After that wall of text yesterday, I think I'll go with a couple short ones today.Given your other question, I'm going to assume you mean "question" as in from the public or a student.  This is a pretty hard question in that I'm not quite sure how to quantify the coolness of a question.  For me, it's pretty cool when a student asks a question that shows he/she is really getting something or thinking about what they're learning.  I'm also very impressed with a lot of the questions at EN World --- in this thread and elsewhere --- because they are well-informed and curious.  And generally on cool topics like wormholes, transporters, etc.  One that stands out (for all the above reasons) was from what I think was a high-school or early college student at a public panel I did on dark matter last fall.  In the question period, he asked about dark energy and multiverses, which was certainly off-topic for the panel.  But it was on a cool topic, showed enthusiasm (ie, this was clearly someone who'd been reading about science), and took advantage of a pretty rare opportunity in Winnipeg.Geez, this is like asking me to choose my favorite pet or something. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />  More seriously, if you're in this line of work and don't find yourself thinking you're working on something cool all the time, you're either getting burnt out or aren't in enough control over your work.I think in terms of "wow" factor, the work I did on "tachyon condensation" in string theory sounds the coolest.  In a less exotic context, tachyon condensation is really similar to a ball rolling down a hill into a valley, and the Higgs field of the Standard Model of particle physics does this in the early universe.  Yes, it would be pretty nasty to live through, but it's a comprehensible enough process.  About 10 years ago, some of my colleagues showed that certain string theory tachyons actually destroy entire dimensions of space when they "roll down the hill."  My work was about applying this in the context of the Big Bang and understanding some details --- one of the results was that the story is actually a bit more complicated, and parts of the original calculations may not be 100% reliable (though that isn't necessarily a surprise when something that dramatic happens).But I'm also very excited about some work I'm doing right now, which definitely also is cool.  This is about black hole formation in "anti-de Sitter" spacetime, or AdS, which is important in string theory for reasons I'll mention in another answer.  What's interesting is that AdS has a gravitational potential even though it's "empty." In normal flat spacetime, if you throw a ball away, it will just keep going.  In AdS, if you're at the center, a ball you throw away will come back.  So, in flat spacetime, matter that tries to collapse into a black hole but isn't concentrated enough will just fly away, but in AdS, it will fly off and then fall back and get another chance to form a black hole.  And over and over. (As usual, I'm oversimplifying a bit, but hey.)  To track how this works and when a black hole forms takes fairly heavy duty computation, and this is my first time doing real computational physics, so that's personally exciting.  And it's a relatively hot topic.  As for the coolness, besides the work itself, the calculations lend themselves to making animations.  Simple ones, but still --- MOVIES!  So that's cool.</blockquote>

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