Here's a selection of public talks I've given over the years that happened to be filmed...
I've hosted several episodes of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)'s Catalyst program. Each is an hour-long documentary on some cool aspects of astrophysics. From flying in a fighter jet to roller-derby and indoor skydiving... I have fun filming these!! The links to the episodes (free to watch in Australia) are:
Mars: the hunt for life (2021)
The Dark Side of the Universe (2023)
1 hr each
Professional level talk in a series supporting Ukrainian physicists. Talking about the latest in cosmology, focusing on the tensions that are arising between different measurements of the same features of the Universe (like the expansion rate, H0).
1 hr
Summary of the primary evidence for dark energy and dark matter.
This is a public talk I delivered at the Information Universe conference in the Netherlands. This is a really interesting conference in which we try to get to the nuts and bolts of what might be making the universe tick.
54 mins
Professional level talk discussing misconceptions about the big bang. Somewhat mathematical, but also conceptual.
1 hr
Little clip of me talking about why I love doing science.
1 min
My overview of modern cosmology in under 20 minutes.
This was my first TEDx experience and I loved it. There were many really interesting talks during the day, and in the breaks I was able to chat to all sorts of interesting and interested people.
18 mins
This was my second TEDx experience and I threw in a few more personal anecdotes and thoughts about what it's like to study astrophysics. And yes... we both survived without drowning. :-)
When I won the L'Oréal Women in Science prize back in 2009 they made this little video about my research (with a cameo from Chris Blake!) I give a very quick summary of how and why we search for dark energy, and what understanding it might teach us.
Quick fun 2 minutes by the Australian Academy of Science's "Brain Box" program.
How far can light travel in the expanding universe? Can we see an infinite distance? Here's a talk I gave to a scientific audience, but it's hopefully accessible to anyone who likes looking at graphs! This is the second half of the talk, for the first half see the next talk. Here's a copy of the spacetime diagrams, here's the Scientific American article, and here's a more technical artilce. (18mins)
This is actually the first half of the talk above, but it is much more mathematical, so a bit less accessible. But it does explain how galaxies can recede from us with velocities faster than the speed of light without violating relativity - and only needs (mostly) high-school maths. The slides are hard to read, so here's a copy. (11 mins)
Another quick blurb made for me after I won the 2012 Foundation Research Excellence Award at UQ. Amusingly, I was overseas when this happened, so the poor quality sound and video is because I was shooting it on my phone!
This was the first "Pint in the Sky" episode, filmed using our amateur equipment in a pub in Perth. Alan Duffy and Katie Mack interviwing me about the WiggleZ Dark Energy survey, which was the big part of my research for about five years. Explains how sound waves created patterns in the distribution of galaxies. (And Ultimate Frisbee also gets a mention!) (13 mins)
This was the continuation of the first "Pint in the Sky" episode with Alan Duffy and Katie Mack interviwing me now about the peculiar velocities of galaxies (any motion that isn't part of the smooth expansion of the unvierse). (5 mins)
A slightly entertaining talk I was asked to give about "warp drives"... not entirely as fantastical as they may seem, as people are genuinely looking into whether they're possible. This was in a series of talks put on by the Australian Academy of Science called "science fiction meets science fact". (1 hour)
Fun talk in quiz style about the expansion of the universe and cosmic horizons.
And here are some radio interviews...
This was a really fun interview, chatting to Richard Fidler about what I do, why I do it, and what got me into it.
An interview I did during my 2011 Women in Science lecture tour (sponsored by the Australian Institute of Physics).
And here are some popular science articles or interviews...
Baffled by the expansion of the universe?
You're not alonge. Even astronomers frequently get it wrong.
Total energy must be conserved. Every student of physics learns this fundamental law. The trouble is, it does not apply to the universe as a whole
The specialness of our "Blue Marble" contrasts with our conviction that we are not privileged observers