From Galaxies to Atoms

I’ll talk about some of the stuff in my latest book with Prof Brian Cox. Specifically, I’ll talk about how cosmologists are currently working with a theory that explains the origin of the Big Bang and contemplates a time when the entire visible Universe was compressed into a region far smaller in size than an atom.

Our Sun provides far more energy than we will ever need, but we use it very inefficiently. We urgently need to design solar cells that are cheaper or more efficient (or preferably both!) Our research is aimed at harvesting sunlight using small semiconductor clusters called ‘quantum dots’, containing only a few hundred atoms.