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/ Events

Testing general relativity with cosmology

28 - 01 February 2011 09:00 - 18:00

 

Organised by Professor Pedro Ferreira, Professor Rachel Bean and Professor Andrew Taylor

If General Relativity holds true then the majority of the Universe’s matter is exotic and unknown. With current developments in theoretical physics, alternatives to Einstein’s theory have begun to emerge. Furthermore, the coming decade promises wide-ranging, cutting edge experiments on cosmic scales. For the first time in almost a century we will begin to test Einstein’s theory and its rivals by comparing them to our ever more precise understanding of the Universe.

Programme available to download here (PDF).

The proceedings of this meeting are scheduled to be published in a future issue of Philosophical Transactions A.

Biographies and audio recordings are available below.

Organisers

  • Professor Pedro Ferreira, University of Oxford, UK

    Pedro G Ferreira is a Professor of Physics at Oxford University and a Tutorial Fellow of Oriel College. He has held research appointments at the University of California at Berkeley and CERN. He is also associated faculty at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cape Town. His fields of interest are General Relativity, the Early Universe, the Cosmic Microwave Background, and Cosmological Data in general. He wrote one of the first papers on the growth of structure in quintessence, he was on the science team that showed the Universe was flat with the Boomerang and Maxima data, and he was one of the first people to show the impact of modified gravity models in large scale structure. He maintains an active involvement in a number of experiments, namely QUIET and FASTSOUND on FMOS and is involved in proposals for the satellite missions EUCLID and CORE. Professor Ferreira has published a book, State of the Universe (W&N -2006) and is working on a new book on the history of relativity, to be published in Spring 2013. 

  • Professor Rachel Bean, Cornell University, USA

    Rachel Bean is an Associate Professor in the Department of Astronomy at Cornell University, where she has been on the faculty since 2005. From 2002-2005 she was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University. She has a MSc (1999) and PhD (2002) in physics from Imperial College, London and a BA Honours in physics (1995) from Cambridge University. Her research in cosmology is at the interface between particle physics, astrophysics theory and astronomical observation. Her work centers on how current and future large scale structure and cosmic microwave background observations can be used to decipher the nature of cosmic inflation, dark matter and dark energy. In 2008, she was one of 11 scientists in the US awarded the Research Corporation’s Cottrell Scholar Award for excellence in research and teaching. In 2010, she was recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. 

  • Professor Andrew Taylor, University of Edinburgh, UK

    Andy Taylor is Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Edinburgh, based at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh. He was awarded a BSc in Manchester and his PhD at Queen Mary College, London. In 1992 he moved to Edinburgh to the Institute for Astronomy where he becoming Professor of Astrophysics in 2007. He is an Editor of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Professor Taylor has interests in both theoretical and observational Cosmology, in particular dark matter and dark energy, weak gravitational lensing, the cosmic microwave background, galaxy redshift surveys and the early Universe. His contributions to Cosmology include distinguishing between competing cosmological models of the Universe and measuring their properties, introducing 3-D Weak Gravitational Lensing, and developing theories of the early Universe and Dark Energy. He led the analysis of the QUAD Cosmic Microwave Background Telescope making the first detailed study of the polarization field from the CMB. He currently leads the Weak Gravitational Lensing analysis for the European Euclid satellite mission to probe Dark Energy and Dark Matter, and co-leads the Cosmological Weak Lensing analysis for the Pan-STARRS telescope.