Speakers
Description
Cosmological observations show that the universe is remarkably uniform on the largest scales accessible to our telescopes. The inflationary theory offers the most compelling theoretical explanation for this uniformity. Rather paradoxically, this theory predicts that on extremely large scales, much greater than what we can see now, the world may look totally different. Instead of being a single spherically symmetric expanding balloon, our universe may look like a "multiverse," a collection of many different exponentially large balloons ("universes") with different laws of low-energy physics operating in each. The new cosmological paradigm, supported by developments in string theory, alters the standard views on the origin and the global structure of the universe and on our own place in the world.