Professor Hiranya Peiris is Professor of Astronomy (1909) at Cambridge, the first woman to hold the prestigious post. Her inaugural lecture, titled 'Decoding the Cosmos', took place at the University's Institute of Astronomy on 22 February 2024.
As a cosmologist, Prof Peiris delves into the mysteries at the edge of our understanding, reaching back to the very first moments of the Universe after the Big Bang. Inspired by the legendary physicist Professor Stephen Hawking, she navigates the uncharted spaces of knowledge, seeking answers to profound questions. Her research often treads the path of high risk and high reward, pushing the boundaries of what we know about the cosmos.
Prof Peiris is noted for her work leading groundbreaking research that bridged theoretical predictions of cosmic inflation (the rapid expansion of the Universe shortly after the Big Bang) with observational data. Her lecture sheds light on the awe-inspiring revelations of other galaxies beyond our own, a discovery made just a century ago.
She describes some highlights from her journey through this rapidly changing cosmological landscape, and discusses how laboratory experiments are helping us test new fundamental physics paradigms developed to explain cosmological observations.
27 фев 2024
