Martin Rees – Our Universe and others

I’ve just got back from a lecture by Martin Rees (of Astronomer Royal fame) at the Centre for Mathematical Sciences. What an interesting speaker he is! Some thought provoking questions were raised such as – could there be numerous Big Bangs and multiple universes? He talked of the horizon of what we could see and how much bigger the universe might actually be. I was throughly convinced of the multiverse I have to say. He reminded us how far cosmology had come in just a couple of hundred years, the cosmological constants that are now established and the divide between the quantum and gravity fields of science. Of course there was a mention of the Harvard announcement today that they’d found gravitational waves thereby proving Einstein’s last unproved theory. Evidence of an expanding universe – tick! In an exceedingly humble ending Professor Rees said Physics had a long way to go. Learning the rules of the universe was he surmised like deducing the rules of chess and it’s a long way from doing that to becoming a Grand Master. All in all a fascinating talk.

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