Meet our new professors
Professor Andrew Jaffe, Professor of Astrophysics 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 #randomuniverse.
Abstract
How do we learn about the Universe? We point our telescopes at the sky and record pictures of what they detect. We use such measurements of the cosmic microwave background — light from 400,000 years after the start of the expansion — to build and refine our cosmological models. Despite the seeming randomness of much of these data, we have built up detailed theories, requiring exotic forms of matter and energy, well beyond what those telescopes can observe directly.
I will discuss how, with observations from the Planck Satellite and its predecessors, we have learned that the Universe has been expanding for 14 billion years, constitute only a few per cent of all the mass and energy in the Universe, and that the seeds of the galaxies and clusters of galaxies we observe on the very largest scales most likely arose from quantum-mechanical randomness in the first fractions of a second.
In the chair: Professor Jordan Nash, Head of the Department of Physics
Vote of Thanks: Professor Marc Kamionkowski, Johns Hopkins University (USA)
Biography
Andrew Jaffe received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1994, and has spent much of his career thinking about how we can refine our cosmological theories using different kinds of data, in particular from the cosmic microwave background (CMB). He was a member of the MAXIMA and BOOMERanG experiment teams, which, in 2000, first used the CMB to make detailed measurements of the cosmological parameters. After postdoctoral positions at the University of Toronto and Berkeley, he has been at Imperial College London since 2001, where he has been a co-Investigator on ESA’s Planck Satellite, launched in 2009, and is a founding member of the Imperial Centre for Inference in Cosmology.