|
7:30 pm, Friday, September 1st, 2017
Hebb Main Lecture Theatre,
2045 East Mall, UBC
This talk will be a public lecture given as part of the conference Gravity: Past, Present, and Future.
From Mars to the Multiverse
Prof. Lord Martin Rees
Cambridge, UK
In the year 2017, unmanned spacecraft have visited all the planets of our
Solar System, and even some of their moons, and extensively explored Mars.
Many thousands of planets have been found orbiting other stars -- some of
these planets even resembling our Earth. Looking further afield, observers
have probed galaxies and the massive back holes at their centres, and
checked models of their evolution by detecting them all the way back to
their formation. Indeed we can trace pre-galactic history back to a
nanosecond after the 'Big Bang'. But the key features of our universe --
its expansion rate, geometry and content -- were established far earlier
even than this, at a time that precision measurements are now trying to
probe.
All these advances pose new questions: What does the long-range cosmic
future hold? Should we be surprised at the emergence of life? Is physical
reality even vaster than what we can see? Are there many 'big bangs' and
many universes? In this illustrated talk I will address these questions.
Prof. Martin Rees (Baron Rees of Ludlow): Martin Rees is one of the pioneers of modern astrophysics, and played a
key role in our understanding of black holes. He has also been
successively Astronomer Royal (UK), and President of the Royal Society
(London). He is well-known to the general public for his popular books and
for his public lectures - the one he will give at UBC in the evening of
Sept 1st is for the general public, from 10-12 years upwards.
To learn more please visit his wikipedia
page.
Additional resources for this talk will be available after the talk.
|