Archives for February 2019

Please mark your calendar for an upcoming workshop, Philosophy of Dark Energy, to be held in at UC Irvine. If you are interested in attending, please contact Deborah Fox. A workshop schedule will be available soon.

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Philosophy of Dark Energy Workshop
March 8 – 10, 2019
University of California, Irvine

In the late 1990s, scientists working on the High-Z Supernovae Search Team and the Supernova Cosmology Project provided the first evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. To explain this acceleration, cosmologists have posited “dark energy”, a previously unknown kind of energy now believed to permeate all of space and to make up approximately 70% of the total energy of the universe. But what is dark energy? Is it the vacuum energy associated with known particle species? Or is it a manifestation of an entirely new entity? Or is it simply a reflection of a non-zero value for Einstein’s “cosmological constant”? This workshop will bring together physicists and philosophers to explore the epistemological and methodological issues raised by dark energy, with a focus on understanding the theoretical motivations and empirical evidence for different proposals concerning its nature.

Invited Speakers:

Luca Amendola (Institute of Theoretical Physics in Heidelberg), The ever-changing dark energy

Robert Brandenberger (McGill University), Dynamical Relaxation of the Cosmological Constant and Dark Energy

Robert Caldwell (Dartmouth College), Dark Energy Needs Dark Radiation

Sean Carroll (Caltech University), Holography, Hilbert Space, and the Cosmological Constant

Anne-Christine Davis (University of Cambridge), Recent developments in Modified Gravity and Chameleons

Paul Hamilton, University of California, Los Angeles

Lavinia Heisenberg, Institute for Theoretical Physics, ETH Zurich

Dragan Huterer (University of Michigan), Dark Energy Two Decades After: Cosmological Probes and Consistency Tests

Jim Peebles (Princeton University), Finding LambdaCDM

Thomas Ryckman, Stanford University

Daniela Saadeh (University of Nottingham), Dark energy: can the fifth force be screened?

Chris Smeenk, University of Western Ontario

Shinji Tsujikawa, Tokyo University of Science

David Wallace, University of Southern California

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This event is made possible by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, to Chris Smeenk and Jim Weatherall.

 

 

 

 

 

Cosmology Center Professor Asantha Cooray will head one of the three main science investigations by SPHEREx, NASA’s newly selected Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer mission. The two-year, $242 million SPHEREx is targeted to launch in 2023. Prof. Cooray’s group will use the telescope-based craft to make measurements to determine how galaxies formed throughout the history of the universe. Astronomers will also employ SPHEREx to study water and ice in the Milky Way to learn how planets come to possess oxygen and other molecules crucial for life. Additionally, the mission will aid in a statistical analysis of the nearby galaxy distribution to shed light on the physics of cosmic inflation, the rapid expansion of the universe during its birth. “All three of these scientific pursuits will be possible with SPHEREx because of how it will measure the spectrum of the night sky from visible to infrared light,” Cooray said. “When it launches in a few years, our hope is that it will help us get a better handle on when and how the first stars and galaxies formed and how many there were, as well as understand whether they formed everywhere in the universe or in particular locations for some reason.”