| Issue 62 (WAIS 2) Contents
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How the Universe Got its Spots
Janna Levin, Cambridge University
Dr
Janna Levin from Cambridge University gave a
remarkable, lucid scientific presentation on the
cosmological concepts presented in her book “How the
Universe Got its Spots”. But she opened her lecture
by commenting on the critics’ response to her
book. They had overwhelmingly commented about
her gender, both positively and negatively, rather
than what she had written in the book.
Janna summarises, “Our universe appears to stretch nearly thirty billion light years across. As far as the eye can see, there is no visible bound to space-time. Still the universe may not be infinite. There was once a cultural prejudice that the earth was flat and unconnected, so much so that explorers were feared to have fallen off the edge. The assumption that space must be infinite may represent a similar bias. A tenable possibility is that space itself is not only curved, as Einstein suggested, but that it is also connected, compact and finite. By searching for the shape and extent of space we are trying to locate ourselves in this vast expanding cosmos.”
By looking far back in space-time are we simply looking at ourselves, only much younger?
Dr Janna Levin is a cosmologist, author and advocate for a finite universe. She is currently an Advanced Fellow in the Department of Applied Maths and Theoretical Physics at the Centre for Mathematical Sciences, Cambridge University. A graduate of Columbia University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Janna previously worked in the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Physics and the University of California Berkeley and the University of Sussex. Her book, How the Universe Got Its Spots, broke new ground on the very personal nature of scientific exploration.