STARBORN at Ratio Forum
It was such a delight to present the topics of my book at RATIO, one of the largest science-themed events in Bulgaria in Nov 2023. The public were fantastic, the organizers incredibly warm and welcoming, and it was great fun to meet and hang out with the other invited speakers, Robin Ince and Louise Allcock! […]
✨ STARBORN launch events in November! ✨
I am thrilled to announce the first launch events for my new book, STARBORN – How the Stars Made Us (and Who We Would Be Without Them). It’s a mix of talks and conversations with amazing scholars, followed by book signing – I look forward to meeting my first readers then! Please do join me […]
From the Big Bang to AI
I’m delighted to have been invited to talk about AI in cosmology by the prestigious Accademia dei XL, an Italian learnt society. The talk (in Italian) has been delivered online – spanning some of the history of astronomy as well as AI, it explains how and why machine learning will be crucial to enable us […]
The Future of Life on Earth
My final lecture as Visiting Professor of Cosmology at Gresham college looks at the threats to life on Earth, with a reflection straddling cosmology, astrophysics, history and environmental issues. I argue that what we need to worry about are not the dangers that are out there, but the ones that are in here – inside […]
The Broken Cosmic Distance Ladder
When Albert Einstein tweaked his newl Measuring distances to astronomical objects outside our Galaxy is a surprisingly hard challenge: it wasn’t until 1923 that Edwin Hubble obtained proof that Andromeda is indeed a galaxy in its own right. Today, astronomers extend distance measurements in the cosmos to the edge of the visible Universe, building up […]
Einstein’s Blunder
A lecture given as Visiting Professor of Cosmology at Gresham College, part of the series “The Frontiers of Knowledge” When Albert Einstein tweaked his newly invented equations of General Relativity in 1917, he had one goal in mind: to find a solution that described a closed, static, eternal universe. He therefore minted a new universal […]
Understanding the Universe with AI
A Gresham College lecture as Visiting Professor of Cosmology, part of the series “The Unexpected Universe“. Digital technology from the early 1990s onwards produced an exponential increase in astronomical data. Within our lifetime, the entirety of the visible universe will have been mapped out: we will have seen everything there is to see. The question will then […]
Mysteries of the Dark Cosmos
A Gresham College lecture as Visiting Professor of Cosmology, part of the series “The Nature of Reality“. Dark matter and dark energy together make up 95% of our Universe. Yet, very little is known about them. This lecture will present the endeavours of cosmologists and particle physicists, as they attempt to explain the fundamental nature of these […]
What Has Einstein Ever Done for You?
A Gresham College lecture as Visiting Professor of Cosmology, part of the series “The Nature of Reality“. Albert Einstein’s mind-boggling ideas revolutionized our view of the universe. From relativity to curved spacetime, from the Big Bang to black holes and gravitational waves, nothing could be further from our everyday experience than such esoteric concepts, right? Wrong! This […]
