Battling the underdetermination of dark energy
Colloquia
- Speaker
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Pedro G. Ferreira
Astrophysics, University of Oxford, UK - When
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2026/05/28
16:00 - Place
- DIPC Josebe-Olarra Lecture Hall
- Add to calendar
-
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Cosmological data has opened up new vistas on fundamental physics yet it is limited in its scope. While it has given us tantalizing hints at how the Universe might be expanding, it is unclear whether it can ever be used to find the microphysical structure of whatever is driving this expansion, which we call dark energy. I will introduce the idea of dark energy, and what we can say about its fundamental nature from current data. I will argue that, if we believe the current data, it is unlikely to be the simplest proposal, and that there is strong evidence that it is far more exotic than we previously thought, bringing with it a host of undesirable consequences.
About the speaker
Pedro G. Ferreira is Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford. He studied and worked at Imperial College in London, at the University of California at Berkeley and at CERN in Geneva. He has held visiting positions at University of Edinburgh, at the Albert Einstein Institute in Berlin and at Columbia University in New York. He won the Gerald Whitrow Prize 2022 and the Eddington Medal 2024 of the Royal Astronomical Society. He is currently the Head of Astrophysics and the director of the Beecroft Institute of Particle Physics and Cosmology at Oxford. His area of expertise is cosmology where he has studied the relic radiation left over from the Big Bang, the nature of dark matter and dark energy, and has led the way in studying alternatives to Einstein’s theory of General Relativity. He has also focused on the theory and analysis of gravitational waves and the use of machine learning methods in the analysis of cosmological data. His book, “The Perfect Theory: A Century of Geniuses and the Battle over General Relativity” was shortlisted for the 2014 Royal Society Winton Science Book Prize.