Colloquium: What Happened Before the Big Bang
Author: UNB
Posted on Nov 29, 2013
Category:
Seminars and Colloquia
Colloquium
What Happened Before the Big Bang?
Martin Bojowald (Penn State)
Thursday, November 14, 2013 at 3:30 pm
Tilley Hall Room 5
The standard model of cosmology suggests that the universe started with a phase of very high density, described by general relativity as a singularity. Quantum gravity attempts to resolve the singularity by a more fundamental, microscopic theory of space-time. If its equations always remain valid, they could tell us what happened at or even before the big bang. This talk reviews one approach, loop quantum gravity, and discusses several surprising new results that shed light on the structure of quantum space-time.
Dr. Martin Bojowald is a professor at Penn State University
