Space Lecture, Winchester Science Centre, talk repeated at 4.30pm and 6.30pm, Wednesday 12th November

Inflation is a period of accelerated expansion in the very early universe that has become widely accepted by cosmologists in recent years. This talk will discuss how inflation provides an understanding of how the large-scale structure of our Universe today could originate from quantum fluctuations. Recent results from the European Space Agency Planck satellite and the BICEP experiment at the south pole are now the subject of intense debate in the scientific community as to whether they provide the first evidence of primordial gravitational waves, often cited as a “smoking gun” for inflation.