Max Planck Lectures

The idea behind the Max Planck Lectures is to invite distinguished figures that have seriously influenced the way we see the world for a lecture on a topic of their choice. The purpose is two-fold: (a) to inspire the members of the research school and (b) as a gesture of thankfulness to the city and public of Bonn that has been hosting the research school since 2002.

Professor Sir Roger Penrose | University of Oxford .

Are we Seeing Signals from Before the Big Bang? Recent results from WMAP and Planck

Date:    21 November 2013

Venue: "Hörsaal I" Main University of Bonn Building, Am Hof 1, 53113 Bonn  


Conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC), initially proposed in 2005, takes what we currently regard as the entire history of the Universe, from its Big-Bang origin (but without any inflationary phase) to its final exponential expansion, to be but one aeon of a continual succession of such aeons. The big bang of each is taken to be a conformal continuation of the exponentially expanding remote future of the previous one via an infinite metric rescaling. A positive cosmological constant (dark energy) and some primordial scalar material (dark matter) are both essential to CCC’s consistency. The 2nd law of thermody-namics is CCC’s driving concept, and its consistency depends upon information loss in the quantum evaporation of black holes. Supermassive black hole encounters in the aeon previous to ours would have important observational implications for CCC, detectable within the cosmic microwave background. Recent evidence for this in both the WMAP and Planck satellite data will be presented.

Here are the press releasethe poster and the video.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnel

Reflections on the discovery of pulsars | Institute of Physics

Date:    21 October 2010

Venue: "Festsaal", Bonn University main building                 

I will give a short account of the discovery of pulsars (pulsating radio stars) and recount some other instances where pulsars were nearly discovered. I will finish with some reflections on the lessons that can be drawn from these stories.

Here are the press releases in English and in German as well as the poster. The video of the talk can be watched here. An m4v version for iPhone can be found here.


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