Public Lectures

On Wednesday, June 25th, professor John Ellis and professor Andrei Linde will deliver two public lectures.

The aim is to present up-to-date status of Higgs boson searches at the LHC and to discuss recent developments in cosmology. Lectures are targeted at a very wide public from advanced high-school students, non-professional physics enthusiasts to physics students and physicists working in other fields of physics.

John Ellis, CERN and King's College London, "The Higgs Boson and Beyond", 14:20-15:20

Abstract:

The discovery of the Higgs Boson at the LHC marks the culmination of a quest that has extended over half a century. It also marks the start of a new era in fundamental physics, opening new vistas in astrophysics and cosmology as well as particle physics.

Andrei Linde, Stanford University, "Inflationary Multiverse", 15:20-16:20

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. These ideas recently received an additional observational confirmation by the results obtained by the Planck satellite.

In some parts of the universe, inflationary quantum fluctuations are so large that they can produce new rapidly expanding parts of the universe, with different properties. 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 be incredibly large. In this talk I will describe some of the features of the new scientific paradigm.