Today our guest is the astrophysicist Katie Mack.

Now when she's not pondering and coding the secrets of space,

Dr Mac's well known to many as a popular scientific tweeter at Astro Katie.

And she's also the author of a new book about the fate of the universe.

We'll get to all that later.

And this being number far, you can also rest assured I'm pretty curious about the role of mathematics in the life of a cosmologist.

Can I first ask, Katie or Catherine?

Katie, Katie.

Because you're Katie on your book, but you're Catherine on your papers.

Yeah, yeah.

It's been a sort of change over time.

It's just because I have the Astro Katie thing,

people don't know who Catherine

Mac is, you know, like in the general public. And with my papers, you know, when I started

writing physics papers, I would use my full name as seemed appropriate. And so I just, I've, I've

diverged into these two different people now.

There's no possibility of switching to Katie on your papers then because then it will cause

this kind of disjoin or?

Yeah, yeah, because then I would have two different names on my, you know, you wouldn't be

able to find all my papers all at once.

So I have to, I have to be Catherine on the papers and I have to be Katie in public stuff. It's just, it's, it's, it's all, it's set now. It's like those, you know, authors who have different, different, different pen names for different genres. That's, that's, that's what I'm at. All right, then. We'll go, we'll go with Katie for now, then. Okay. Where are you from? Where were you born? I was born in Long Beach, California, just, you know, sort of L.A. area.

And I've been... Where are you from? Where were you born? I was born in Long Beach, California, just, you know, sort of

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