Osher Lifelong Learning Institute
What Came Before the Big Bang?
Speaker
Professor Brian Keating
Coordinator
Steve Clarey
The question of what came before the Big Bang is a subject of scientific speculation, with leading theories proposing a period of cosmic inflation, a rapid expansion that preceded the Big Bang, or a cyclic universe model, where a previous universe collapsed and “bounced” into our current one. Another idea is that our universe is a “bubble” that “bubbled off” from a larger parent universe. It is also possible that our current physics cannot describe the period before the Big Bang, and space and time as we know them may not have existed. This provocative lecture will probe these questions and others about the origin of our universe.
Speaker Bio
Presenter: Brian Keating is a chancellor’s distinguished professor of physics and an experimental cosmologist at UC San Diego. He works on observations of the cosmic microwave background, the leftover heat from the Big Bang. He is the principal investigator of the Simons Observatory in the Chilean desert. He received his PhD from Brown University in 2000 and is the author of two books, Losing the Nobel Prize and Into the Impossible.
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