Meet our new professors
Alan Heavens, Chair in Astrostatistics and Director of the Imperial Centre for Inference and Cosmology, Department of Physics
The lecture is free to attend and open to all, but registration in advance in required – contact the events team for your place.
To interact about this lecture on Twitter, use the hashtag #darkside.
Like particle physicists, cosmologists have a ‘standard model’, which appears to explain almost everything we observe in the universe. This model presents a strange universe that is expanding at an accelerating rate. Dark and unknown matter make up 95%, part of which has a distinctly unusual form. The alternative is that the universe’s expansion is being driven by the cosmological constant, introduced into General Relativity, but later regretted, by Einstein.
In my lecture I will explore how we have come to this current state of knowledge. I will discuss how we look for extensions to the standard model by studying the properties of the dark universe, and how in future we may even be able to make observations to detect extra dimensions of space. I will also touch on how ideas developed for cosmological analysis are assisting radiologists to analyse medical images.
Speaker biography
Professor Alan Heavens is the Director of the Imperial Centre for Inference and Cosmology, founded in 2012 in the Departments of Physics and Mathematics at Imperial College London. After graduating from Cambridge, he moved to the University of Edinburgh, becoming Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics. He has developed novel analysis methods for cosmology, with the aim of extracting as much information as possible. He introduced principled statistical analysis to the study of the distribution of galaxies, initiated the field of optimized methods for studying 3-point statistics of the light from the early universe, and pioneered 3D analysis of the bending of light as it passes through the universe. His optimized statistical analysis methods led to the formation of Blackford Analysis, a spin-out company that specialises in fast and accurate analysis of 3D medical images.