What is the biggest number you’ve ever heard of? A trillion? A quadrillion or even a quintillion? Well, let me introduce you to Graham’s number, a number so large that if you thought about it the wrong way, your head would collapse into a black hole. In this talk, inspired by my book, Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them, I will take you on a head twisting cosmic tour, using some extraordinary numbers to explore the deepest and most fundamental truths in our universe. of the universe. As well as Graham’s Number and the curse of Black Hole Death, we will encounter a googolplex and the gigantic googolplician universe, so big that it contains exact copies of each and everyone of us. And I really mean an exact copy, stood somewhere far away in the cosmos, reading an abstract for a popular science talk. This might sound like science fiction but its not. It is physics at the cutting edge.
Antonio Padilla is a leading theoretical physicist and cosmologist at the University of Nottingham. He is the Associate Director of the new Nottingham Centre of Gravity and has served as the chair of U.K. Cosmology for over a decade. In 2016, he and his collaborator shared the Buchalter Cosmology Prize for their work on the cosmological constant. He is also a star of the Numberphile YouTube network, where his most popular videos include a discussion of Ramanujan’s sum of all positive integers, which has been viewed more than seven million times.
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This hybrid meeting will be available via Zoom for on-line ticket holders. Codes sent out by email 24 hours before event start or available on this events online page.
