Description

Over the last three or four years, a revolution has occurred in our understanding of the Universe on the largest scales of space and time. We now understand that the dominant form of matter in our Universe is some kind of substance utterly unlike anything we have ever found on Earth. This is a form of matter whose existence has been inferred not by direct observation but rather by a process of mathematical deduction from direct observations. Thus, sophisticated mathematics is now indispensable not just for understanding the world, but even for detecting its contents.

Speaker

A/P Brett Mclnnes

Abstract

Traditionally, cosmologists envisioned essentially two possible ways in which the universe could end: either in a Big Crunch, in which the universe is squashed, or a Big Freeze, in which the universe expands forever. The recent revolution in cosmology, founded on the astounding discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, opened up a whole new range of exciting possibilities, some of which have only recently been discovered. Some of these new ways for the universe to end are so strange that they are literally unimaginable

Coordinator

A/P Denny Leung