Please join us for the SED Director’s Seminar hosted by the X-ray Astrophysics Laboratory, Code 662!

The assembly, dynamics, and chemistry of galaxy clusters seen by XRISM
Francois Mernier, Code 662

Uncovering the mysteries of supermassive black holes with XRISM
Anna Ogorzalek, Code 662

A first glimpse into Galactic X-ray Binaries with XRISM
Ralf Ballhausen, Code 662

On the Origin of Time
David Hertog (KU Leuven)

Perhaps the biggest question Stephen Hawking tried to answer in his extraordinary career was how the universe could have created conditions so perfectly hospitable to life. Pondering this mystery led him to study the big bang origin, but his early work ran into a crisis when the math predicted many big bangs producing many universes, most far too bizarre to harbor life. Holed up in theoretical physics departments across the globe, Hawking and I worked shoulder to shoulder for twenty years, to develop a novel quantum framework for early universe cosmology that could account for the emergence of life. At the heart of our cosmogony lies a physical theory hat predicts that time and indeed physics itself fade away back into the big bang. In this colloquium I recount our quest to get a grips on the origin of time, and the bold new take on some of the universe’s fundamentals we are being led to.

On the Origin of Time
Thomas Hertog (KU Leuven, Belgium)