Join renowned cosmologist George Efstathiou as he explores how cosmology has changed over recent decades, and what secrets are still to be discovered.
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This lecture was recorded at the Ri on 28 February 2025.
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The standard model of cosmology as we know it has been meticulously defined by cosmic microwave background radiation captured by the Planck satellite. But do scientists yet fully understand the component parts of this model at a fundamental level?
In this Discourse, world-renowned cosmologist George Efstathiou will discuss how the field of cosmology has transformed over recent decades, from the big bang controversy of sixty years ago to the quantitative data-driven science of the present day. The standard model of cosmology states that the structure in the Universe arose from quantum fluctuations that were stretched in scale during an early inflationary phase in the Universe’s history.
George will question how much we have actually learned, given that the three key ingredients of the model – inflation, cold dark matter and dark energy – are still misunderstood. Join George for an evening of unmissable wonder, as he speculates whether the Universe will hang on to its secrets for generations or whether a new paradigm shift may come within the next few years.
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George Efstathiou is Professor of Astrophysics, and fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. He received his B.A. in Physics from Keble College, Oxford University in 1976, and his Ph.D. in Astronomy from Durham University in 1979. Following postdoctoral positions at the University of California, Berkeley and the Institute for Astronomy, Cambridge, he was appointed to a faculty position in Cambridge in 1984. In 1988 he took up the Savilian Chair of Astronomy at Oxford, and served as Head of Astrophysics from 1988-1994. He returned to Cambridge in 1997 as Professor of Astrophysics (1909) and served as Director of the Institute of Astronomy from 2004-2008. He was appointed as the first Director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmology Cambridge from 2008 – 2016. Professor Efstathiou has received several prizes for his research including the 1990 Maxwell Medal and Prize of the Institute of Physics, the 2005 American Institute of Physics Heineman Prize for Astronomy, the 2011 Gruber Cosmology Prize, the 2013 Nemitsas Prize in Physics, the 2022 Gold Medal in Astronomy of the Royal Astronomical Society and the 2024 Einstein Medal of the Einstein-Gesellschaft.
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