Battle of the Big Bang: Drs. Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Halper

Let’s take another break (we all need it) from “rage Friday” and enjoy a “science Friday” instead! Join us on October 10 at noon (PST) as we welcome Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Halper, authors of Battle of the Big Bang: The New Tales of Our Cosmic Origins.

Click hereto watch this virtual presentation on Secular AZ’s YouTube channel

Their book is described as a “thrilling exploration of competing cosmological origin stories, comparing new scientific ideas that upend our very notions of space, time, and reality.”

The universe started with a bang some 13.8 billion years ago…. but what  – if anything – happened before the Big Bang?  Afshordi and Halper offer a tour of some peculiar possibilities like bouncing and cyclic universes, time loops, creations from nothing, multiverses, black hole births, string theories, and holograms, and some scientific debate.

Astrophysicist Niayesh Afshordi is a professor in the Astrophysics and Gravitation group at the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Waterloo and a  founding faculty member at the Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics (WCA). He’s also an Associate Faculty in the Cosmology and Gravitation group at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physic (PI).

He finished his PhD at Princeton University Observatory and was then a fellow at the Institute for Theory and Computation (ITC) at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics  and a Distinguished Research Fellow at PI.

Phil Halper is a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and a science popularizer. He is the creator of the popular YouTube series Before the Big Bang, which has had several million views, and was previously journalist in residence at the Penn State Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos. His astronomy images have been featured in major media outlets including The Washington Post, the BBC, and The Guardian, and he has published several papers in peer-reviewed journals. He lives in London. Online, he’s popularly known as SkyDivePhil.