Public Lecture | Simulating the Universe by Prof Romeel Davé

#NationalScienceWeek2015 hosted by AIMS South Africa

ABSTRACT: How did the Universe come to look the way it does? Numerical cosmologists are trying to answer this by modeling the history of our Universe using powerful supercomputers. The results have been sometimes surprising, often amazing, and always enlightening. We have learned about dark matter, dark energy, inflation, and the quantum fluctuations that seeded everything we see. Powerful telescopes have shown us the remarkable Cosmic Web traced out by galaxies with a dizzying array of properties. Combining supercomputers and next-generation telescopes such as the SKA, cosmologists hope to, for the first time in human history, assemble a complete and verifiable story of how our Universe and everything within it came to be. This lecture will chart our progress so far, and reflect on how much we have yet to discover about the Universe that we call home.

Prof Romeel Davé, the SARChI Chair in Cosmology with Multi-wavelength Data, a joint national research chair split between AIMS, the University of the Western Cape, and the South African Astronomical Observatory. He obtained his PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and held Spitzer and Hubble Fellowships, and was on the faculty at the University of Arizona before coming to Cape Town in January 2013. Prof Davé uses hydrodynamic simulations on supercomputers to study the evolution of the observable Universe, including galaxies, clusters, black holes, and intergalactic gas.