Professor Jim Al-Khalili introducing world-renowned physicist Professor Sir Roger Penrose, guest speaker at the inaugural Lewis Elton Lecture at the University of Surrey on the 16 February 2012.



Abstract: According to currently standard cosmology, the universe started with a Big Bang, immediately followed by a fleeting moment of exponential expansion, called “inflation”. Following this it settled down to a more sedate expansion, but due to what is called “dark energy," it is currently commencing a second period of exponential expansion that is expected to continue indefinitely. In this talk I describe an alternative idea, which argues that this picture provides merely one aeon of a continual succession of such aeons. The Universe never collapses in this model, but the remote future of each aeon becomes, when infinitely scaled down, the big bang of the next. Collisions between supermassive black holes in the aeon previous to ours would, according to my model, provide disturbances that should be just about observable in the cosmic microwave background of our own aeon. In this talk I shall describe evidence indicating that these disturbances may actually be present, and possibly providing us with some hint of what the aeon prior to ours may actually have been like. The talk will be largely free of equations, depending mostly on pictures, but a brief summary of the equations needed for the theory will be provided at the end.

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Tags: jim al-khalili, sir roger penrose, professor, university of surrey, lewis elton, lecture, surrey

The complete 1971 set of 'the Race into Space' collectors cards in the original album

My mum was clearing out her attic recently so I got to trawl through a load of stuff I’ve kept from childhood. I was delighted to come across this album, and to find that all the collectors cards were still in situ - over 40 years later. I still remember making my mum buy loads of Brooke Bond PG Tips tea so I could collect what to the 8 year old me were mesmerising images of our not too distant future…



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Tags: photographs, scans, space, booke bond, nasa, shuttle, collectors cards, tea, astronaut, astronomy

Scanning some old photos the other day I came across these two here. The first is from when I went to see the legendary Concorde take off from Heathrow Airport and just caught it with my little Kodak Pocket Instamatic 110 camera, because that's what 13 year old boys did in the 1970s…



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Tags: concorde, photographs, retro, vintage, lovell telescope, jodrell bank, physics, astronomy, observatory