Physics Beyond the Horizon – Niayesh Afshordi
Date: Tue. February 12th, 2008, 4:30 pm-5:30 pmLocation: Rockefeller 221
The history of human knowledge is often highlighted by our efforts to explore beyond our apparent horizon. In this talk, I will describe how this challenge has now evolved into our quest to understand the physics at/beyond the cosmological horizon, some twenty orders of magnitude beyond Columbus’s original plan. I also argue why inflationary paradigm predicts the existence of non-trivial physics beyond the cosmological horizon, and how we can use the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect in the Cosmic Microwave Background to probe this physics, which includes the nature of gravity and primordial non-gaussianity on the horizon scale.