Black Holes and Cosmic Collisions

"Why does the Universe exist? Physicists believe that the answer lies deep inside the mysterious world of black holes, where space and time is as strange and complicated as it was at the beginning, when the Universe was born. I will take us on a journey of discovery, from the black hole at the centre of our galaxy, to the exotic world of string theory, extra dimensions and parallel universes. Find out what it’s like to fall into a black hole, why we believe in extra dimensions, and what this all has to do with a 9billion dollar machine that smashes things together at almost the speed of light.

On September 14th 2015 the distance between 4 pairs of mirrors separated by 4km each, positioned  at two different location in the United States, changed by what is less than the diameter of an atom. I will explain how we know that this event, measured by the LIGO gravitational wave detector, implies that 2 black holes, each of them about 30 times more massive than the Sun, collided about 1 billion years ago.

What are you really drinking when you down your pint? Probably some beer, and if you're unfortunate maybe something else. But cosmology tells us there is a lot. Space is a swarm of strange and wonderful things: energy fields, cosmic rays, neutrinos, dark matter and maybe even more. To understand what is in your pint we need explore the profound connection between the tiny realms of particle physics and the grandest scales of the Universe. I'll tell you how we can use maps of the cosmos to learn about fundamental particles and how we can smash protons to learn about the formation of galaxies.