My Life in Physical Cosmology - by James Peebles

On December 13th, 2019, James Peebles, Nobel Prize in Physics 2019, visited the Oskar Klein Centre and the Department of Physics at Stockholm university to give an informal talk. "My thesis advisor and professor of continuing education, Bob Dicke, suggested I look into cosmology. That was 1964. I was uneasy because the empirical basis seemed so slight, but I could think of a few things to analyze after which I imagined I would return to something more substantial. But one thought led to another and then another through my career as the theory and practice of cosmology grew. I will offer thoughts about my experience and the broader lessons to drawn from the establishment of this considerable extension of the reach of natural science. The lessons can be drawn from other branches of science, but I think they are particularly clear in cosmology because this is a conceptually simple subject involving relatively few people up to its transition to Big Science."