The Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics announces the fourth mini-course by Stanford physics faculty on recent fundamental advances in theoretical physics. The winter quarter's lectures will be by Professor Leonardo Senatore.
In the last few decades, we have been able to look at the sky with unprecedented precision and our understanding of the evolution of the universe has changed radically. We have found that the universe is very large and remarkably homogeneous, but at the same time it has structures on all length scales. In order to obtain a universe such as the one we see around us, a quite mysterious period of exponential expansion, called inflation, seems to be required at the beginning of the universe. The universe is also accelerating today, apparently dominated by a cosmological constant. All of this is a challenge for our currently established physical laws. Professor Senatore will give an overview of the observations and the physical ideas behind our current investigations of the evolution of the universe.