Speaker
John Barrow
Description
An introduction to the expanding universe and those
questions that everyone asks
about it –What is it expanding into? Are we at the centre
of the expansion? What is
expanding? We will then introduce the ‘cosmological
constant’ and its effects on the
expansion of the universe, see why was it invented by
Einstein, and discover how
it can be made to appear inevitably in Newton’s theory
of gravity. Particle physics
provided a new interpretation of the cosmological
constant as the vacuum energy of
the universe. We will then see why this meant that
almost no one believed it existed
before it was discovered.
Primary author
John Barrow
