Harvard Science Book Talk: Niayesh Afshordi, in conversation with Lisa Randall, "Battle of the Big Bang: The New Tales of Our Cosmic Origins"

By most popular accounts, the universe started with a bang some 13.8 billion years ago. But what happened before the Big Bang? And how do we know it happened at all? In Battle of the Big Bang, prominent cosmologist Niayesh Afshordi and science communicator Phil Halper offer a tour of the peculiar possibilities: bouncing and cyclic universes, time loops, creations from nothing, multiverses, black hole births, string theories, and holograms. Along the way, they offer both a call for new physics and a riveting story of scientific debate.
 
Incorporating insights from Afshordi’s cutting-edge research and Halper’s original interviews with scientists like Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, and Alan Guth, Battle of the Big Bang compares these models for the origin of our origins, showing each theory’s strengths and weaknesses and explaining new attempts to test these notions. Battle of the Big Bang is a tale of rivalries and intrigue, of clashes of ideas that have raged from Greek antiquity to the present day over whether the universe is eternal or had a beginning, whether it is unique or one of many. But most of all, Afshordi and Halper show that this search is filled with wonder, discovery, and community—all essential for remembering a forgotten cosmic past.

Niayesh Afshordi is professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo and associate faculty at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario, Canada. His prizewinning research focuses on competing models for the early universe, dark energy, dark matter, black holes, holography, and gravitational waves. He has contributed to Scientific American and was a consultant to PBS’s NOVA, and his work has been featured in numerous popular media outlets, such as the covers of Scientific American and Science, as well as in The Guardian and The New York Times.

Lisa Randall is the Frank B. Baird, Jr., Professor of Science at Harvard University. She studies theoretical particle physics and cosmology. Her research connects theoretical insights to puzzles in our current understanding of the properties and interactions of matter. She has developed and studied a wide variety of models to address these questions, the most prominent involving extra dimensions of space. Her work has involved improving our under-standing of the Standard Model of particle physics, supersymmetry, baryogenesis, cosmological inflation, and dark matter. Randall’s research also explores ways to experimentally test and verify ideas and her current research focuses in large part on the Large Hadron Collider and dark matter searches and models. Randall has also had a public presence through her writing, lectures, and radio and TV appearances. Randall’s books, Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions and Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World were both on the New York Times’ list of 100 Notable Books of the Year. Higgs Discovery: The Power of Empty Space was released as a Kindle Single in the summer of 2012 as an update with recent particle physics developments.

Organization/Sponsor: Harvard Division of Science, Harvard Library, and Harvard Book Store.
For more information and videos of Harvard Science Book Talks, see https://science.fas.harvard.edu/book-talks.

Contact Info: science_lectures@fas.harvard.edu