Speaker:Prof. Neil Turok (DAMTP)
Venue: Old Combination Room, Trinity College
Time: 22/10/2007 20:30, drinks from 20:15

The last decade has seen huge advances in our understanding of the makeup and history of the universe. Some properties of the universe – its geometry and the nature of the primordial density inhomogeneities – are astonishingly simple. Other properties – like the existence of dark energy – are very hard to reconcile with standard cosmology. And the cosmic singularity from which everything emerged remains a deep mystery. I will discuss a radical new approach, the cyclic model, based on ideas from string theory and M theory, which explains the observations without invoking a period of cosmic inflation. I will describe how future observations could distinguish the inflationary and cyclic models.