Date/Time
Date(s) - 25/02/2016
4:00 pm - 5:00 pm

Title: Natureâ??s Ultimate Time Machine: Photographing the Infant Universe

Speaker: Dr. Amber Miller

Institute: Columbia University – PUBLIC LECTURE

Location: Con Hall

Description:

Historians and archaeologists can only dream of taking photographs of ancient civilizations, of observing their daily activities, of watching the construction of cities and the evolution of conflicts. Incredibly, with modern tools and technologies, cosmologists have at their fingertips the astrophysical equivalent: the capability to photograph the formation and evolution of our universe. I will describe the experimental and observational methods that make this possible, and review the highlights of what we have learned as we have made observations of the universe further and further back in time. Finally, I will discuss the current cosmological frontier: the challenge of observing the universe when it was much less than a second old. These observations hold the promise of revealing the nature of fundamental physics at the very moment at which our universe came into being.