In the Dark

As we head into the Day 2 of the ITP2023 I thought I’d share the slides I used for the public talk I gave last night. We had an audience of around a hundred which wasn’t bad given that it is graduation week and the undergraduates aren’t back!

Here is the abstract used to advertise the talk:

Euclid is the name of a new scientific mission from the European Space Agency, launched on July 1st, designed to explore the composition and evolution of the Universe. The Euclid mission takes its name from the ancient Greek mathematician regarded by many as the Father of geometry. Until the last century, Euclid’s theorems were assumed not just to be mathematical notions, but to describe the geometrical structure of the physical Universe. Einstein’s general theory of relativity swept that idea aside and gave us new ways of describing space, by unifying it with time, and by allowing it to be affected by matter in a manner very different from that formulated by Euclid. Over the past century, this theory has proved to be very effective at describing the properties of the Universe as observed by modern astronomical telescopes, while also suggesting the existence of dark matter and dark energy.

The Euclid telescope will create an enormous map of the large-scale structure of the Universe across space and time by observing billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years, across more than a third of the sky. Euclid will explore how the Universe has expanded and how galaxies and clusters of galaxies have formed over cosmic history, and how space itself is distorted by these structures.

This talk will discuss our modern ideas of space and time, how the Euclid mission will try to test whether or not they are correct and shed light on the nature of dark matter and dark energy.

And here are the slides:

Obviously I cut a number of long stories very short, which probably contributed to why I had a lot of questions from the audience at the end of the talk. I always assume that’s a basically a good sign because it shows people are interested, but it also makes me worry that I didn’t explain things very well!

We didn’t finish until past 9 o’clock and it was a very warm evening, so I was very happy to have a few pints afterwards in O’Neills…

This entry was posted on September 7, 2023 at 8:58 am and is filed under Biographical, Talks and Reviews with tags Cosmology, Euclid, Maynooth University. 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.