The Centennial Celebration
for OU's Homer L. Dodge Department of Physics and Astronomy!
Public Lecture by Andrei Linde
- Time: 8:00 p.m.
- Date: Wednesday, October 20
- Place: Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History
Title: Inflationary Multiverse
Abstract:
For a long time scientists believed that our universe was born as an expanding ball of fire. This scenario dramatically changed during the last 30 years. Now we think that initially the universe was rapidly inflating, being in an unstable energetic vacuum-like state. It became hot only later, when this vacuum-like state decayed. Quantum fluctuations produced during inflation are responsible for galaxy formation. In some places, these quantum fluctuations are so large that they can produce new rapidly expanding parts of the universe. This process transforms the universe into a multiverse, a huge eternally growing fractal consisting of many exponentially large parts with different laws of physics operating in each of them. This picture became even more interesting lately, when string theory predicted that the total number of different laws of physics operating in different parts of the universe can also be exponentially large. In this talk I will describe some of the features of the new scientific paradigm.
Here is the poster.
For more information about Professor Linde, see his web page.
We have a video of this lecture available below. You can seek to any position in the video, even before it is fully loaded.