The Cosmic Web at Sussex
Yesterday I had the honour of giving an evening lecture for staff and students at the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of Sussex. The event was preceded by a bit of impromptu twilight stargazing with the new telescope our students have just purchased:
You can just about see Venus in the second picture, just to the left of the street light.
Anyway, after briefly pretending to be a proper astronomer it was down to my regular business as a cosmologist and my talk entitled The Cosmic Web. Here is the abstract:
The lecture will focus on the large-scale structure of the Universe and the ideas that physicists are weaving together to explain how it came to be the way it is. Over the last few decades, astronomers have revealed that our cosmos is not only vast in scale – at least 14 billion light years in radius – but also exceedingly complex, with galaxies and clusters of galaxies linked together in immense chains and sheets, surrounding giant voids of (apparently) empty space. Cosmologists have developed theoretical explanations for its origin that involve such exotic concepts as ‘dark matter’ and ‘cosmic inflation’, producing a cosmic web of ideas that is, in some ways, as rich and fascinating as the Universe itself.
And for those of you interested, here are the slides I used for your perusal:
It was quite a large (and very mixed) audience; it’s always difficult to pitch a talk at the right level in those circumstances so that it’s not too boring for the people who know something already but not too challenging for those who don’t know anything at all. A couple of people walked out about five minutes into the talk, which doesn’t exactly inspire a speaker with confidence, but overall it seemed to go down quite well.
Most of all, thank you to the organizers for the very nice reward of a bottle of wine!
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In the Dark 
December 10, 2013 at 8:15 pm
A very informative and also vastly amusing lecture, pitched at a level to enthuse both the father (retired philosopher who can’t tell Bosch from Bruegel) and the son (aspiring physicist). We argued all the way home about String Theory and the nature of knowledge.
December 10, 2013 at 10:29 pm
Your talk looks like it was pitched just right for someone like me – an enthusiastic amateur who is happy with a few equations. If it was videoed then please can you stick it up on You-Tube and you can tick a “wider public engagement” box on one of those many sheets of paper that I expect academics have to complete 😉
December 11, 2013 at 7:32 am
New telescope! Right time to arrange an early morning (pre-dawn) session to watch comet Lovejoy (C/2013 R1).