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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.
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