Physics and Astronomy Colloquium
The Expansion of Space
Presented by Lloyd Knox, UC Davis
To help the audience deveIop some intuition for an expanding spacetime I will turn to the imaginative works of J.K. Rowling and the creators of Dr. Who. With our minds thus freed from limiting Euclidean conceptions of the nature of space, we will go on to discuss the expansion of space over its entire history. Sensitivity of particular observables to the expansion rate has led us to remarkably tight constraints on the rate in the first few minutes of the expansion, a few hundred thousand years later, and in the current epoch where it is roughly 1 part in 10 billion per year. Inferences of this rate in the current epoch (Hubble's constant, or H_0) differ significantly depending on methodology. I will explain why these differences are arguably the hottest topic in cosmology today.
3:30 pm, Friday, January 31, 2020
PAIS-1100, PAIS
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