Friday, November 9, 2001, 16:00
WHGA Auditorium
Prof. S. Sarkar, Oxford
Abstract:
Recent observations of small angular scale fluctuations in the cosmic
microwave background have provided significant evidence for two key
'predictions' of inflation - that the universe has a flat geometry and
that the spectrum of primordial density perturbations is close to
scale-invariant. However on the theoretical side we lack a compelling
physical model of inflation, and indeed have no fundamental
understanding of the cosmological constant which must be invoked to drive inflation.