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7:30 pm, Wednesday, October 12th, 2016
Fairmont Lounge, St. John's College
2111 Lower Mall, UBC

 

Unifying the Universe

Andrei Barvinsky

Lebedev Institute, Moscow

One reason why physics is so effective as a science is the "separation of energy scales" in Nature-- phenomena occurring at different scales can be described using different methods and models. However, there are also remarkable unifying principles, relating vast galactic structures extending across billions of light years down to the Higgs boson, sixteen orders of magnitude smaller than a pinhead. The mechanism behind this unification, threading the whole history of our Universe from its quantum birth until now, is called "cosmological inflation". This extremely rapid expansion of the very early Universe also gives us what is in effect a gigantic microscope, allowing a glimpse into the mysteries of its quantum creation and the beauty of the underlying mathematical constructions.

Additional resources for this talk: slides, video.