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Schedule including this lecture.
Goddard Space Flight Center Engineering Colloquium
Date: Monday, March 5, 2001
One of the most surprising recent results from cosmology is the evidence that the expansion of our universe is accelerating! Furthermore, this discovery also implies that the energy density in our universe is neither dominated by luminous matter nor even by dark matter, but rather, by the energy of the vacuum.
What does this mean for the fate of the universe? Do these discoveries contradict our belief that the fundamental theory of the universe must be beautiful?
Dr. Mario Livio is the Head of the Science Division at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). He received his Ph.D. in theoretical astrophysics from Tel Aviv University in Israel, was a professor in the Physics Dept. of the Technion-Israel Institute of technology from 1981 till 1991, and joined STScI in 1991. Dr. Livio has published over 300 scientific papers and received numerous awards for research and for excellence in teaching.
His interests span a broad range of topics in astrophysics, from cosmology to the emergence of intelligent life. Dr. Livio has done much fundamental work on the topic of accretion of mass onto black holes, neutron stars, and white dwarfs, as well as on the formation of black holes and the possibility to extract energy from them. During the past two years, Dr. Livio's research focused on supernova explosions and their use in cosmology to determine the rate of expansion of the universe. In particular, he has shown that in spite of some uncertainties that still exist in theoretical models for supernovae, it is very likely that the recent findings that the expansion of our universe is accelerating are correct.
In addition to his scientific interests, Dr. Livio is a self-proclaimed 'art fanatic' who owns many hundreds of art books. This year he combined his passions for science and art to write a popular book, The Accelerating Universe, which discusses 'beauty' as an essential ingredient in fundamental theories of the universe. Dr. Livio has given public seminars at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., the Library of Congress, the Hayden Planetarium in New York, the Johnson Space Center, the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, the Institute of Astrophysics in Munich Germany, and many more.
Colloquium Committee Sponsor: Barbara Pfarr
Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov