In the Dark

Sorry to be so late advertising this but it’s been a busy week. This year’s Royal Astronomical Society Gerald Whitrow lecture will be given this afternoon by Prof. Pedro Ferreira of Oxford University, as a hybrid event. You have until 3pm to register. Among many other things, Pedro is a member of the Editorial Board of the Open Journal of Astrophysics…

The abstract of the lecture is:

Observations of the large scale structure of the Universe have allowed us to validate a powerful mathematical model of the Universe. We can now measure with remarkable precision, a number of properties such as its geometry, its matter content and the morphology of the initial conditions. This model is firmly rooted in physics that we know yet also reliant on speculative assumptions: inflation, dark matter and dark energy. As our understanding of the cosmological model has developed, and with ever improving data, we have been confronted with anomalies and inconsistencies. There is hope that, with new observations, more powerful simulations and the new developments in machine learning and data science, we will be able to fully resolve any inconsistencies. But there is a real risk that, if we don’t start to think differently, we will never completely understand our mathematical model. Ultimately we may never know how our Universe really works.

It should be an interesting talk and there’s still a bit of time to register. Alternatively you can wait until the recording appears on YouTube. I’ll add a link here when it does.

This entry was posted on October 14, 2022 at 1:51 pm and is filed under The Universe and Stuff with tags Cosmic Ignorance, Gerald Whitrow Lecture, Pedro Ferreira, Royal Astronomical Society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.