String theorist visits UCF to discuss the Big Bang

Liam McAllister, Cornell University physicist and expert string theorist, visited the University of Central Florida Thursday evening to deliver a lecture on the latest cosmological research and theories that seek to explain the forces of energy that triggered the Big Bang.

“The pattern of galaxies in the night sky traces the peaks and troughs of ‘the first sound,’ a reverberation of the Big Bang,” McAllister said. This pattern of ripples relies on the dark matter and dark energy that together make up 96 percent of all matter in the universe.

McAllister’s speech featured animated simulations of the Cosmic Microwave Background that showed how these ripples, created by an extremely rapid initial inflation of the universe, formed as the universe expanded. These ripples, seen as differences in temperature when looking into the past, laid the seeds for galaxies. The presentation, titled “The Sound of the Beginning: Echoes of the Big Bang in the Night Sky,” was sponsored by the UCF Physics Department and S. Goldman Foundation as part of the Goldman Public Talks series. The event drew a crowd of about 60 people, most of them students, in room 125 of the Health and Public Affairs building.

Read more about the visit here.