Dawn Bonker
Menas Kafatos, Ph.D., dean of Chapman University’s Schmid College of Science and vice chancellor for special projects, will present a colloquium titled “The Evolving Universe: Successes and Challenges” at 3 p.m. Thursday, April 28, at Irvine Lecture Hall.
Modern cosmology has helped quantum physicists make tremendous progress, but also opened the door to new questions, says Dean Kafatos.
“In the midst of all the successes, a few clouds remain,” Kafatos says. “For one, pushing theory beyond the limits of observation, point to some epistemological challenges. Also, we still don’t have a quantum theory of gravity and as such, the “beginning” (or Planck era) cannot be properly integrated into the evolution. Other ideas, such as the multiverse have emerged, which may or may not have shed more light on the actual state of the universe. I will briefly address another challenge, the observational issues of the Hubble Diagram of quasars.”
