When I was a young adult, South by Southwest was one of the most important music festivals in the US, a showcase especially for “indie” and “college” music in the late 80s and early 90s. Alas, despite brief stints as a college DJ and aspiring music journalist, I never made it down to Austin for it (although I visited the University of Texas quite a few times at other parts of the year). By the mid-1990s it had added tracks in film and “multimedia” (is that still a thing?), and technology eventually came to take over (follow the money).

So it’s with both excitement and apprehension that I’m announcing that I’ll be speaking at SXSW 2027, which runs 15–21 March, giving a talk called “How Do We Know What We Know About the Universe & the World?” in the Tech & AI programme. That’s perhaps less odd than it sounds: the tools we use to learn about the Universe from noisy, incomplete data are close cousins of the ones that let machines learn from data (which is also why I get to teach Information Theory at Imperial).

The talk is largely based on my book, The Random Universe, and I’ll roam from David Hume’s epistemological worries and Thomas Bayes’s probability to modern cosmologists’ models of the Universe. I’ll ask how we can hope to understand the Universe from our limited vantage point here on our lonely planet, and how we can know whether we’ve got it right. And what can getting it right even mean, as our observations confront our theories?

I’ll update this post with the day, time and venue once they’re announced. So, if you’re in Austin this March, come, listen, and most definitely ask questions.