A lecture by Professor Bharat Ratra recipient of the 2025 Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society

The Accelerating Expanding Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and Einstein’s Cosmological Constant

You are invited to a special public lecture organised by the Central European Institute for Cosmology and Fundamental Physics (CEICO) and the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences.

The lecture will be delivered by Professor Bharat Ratra, who was awarded the 2025 Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society.

Dark energy is the leading candidate for the mechanism that is responsible for causing the cosmological expansion to accelerate. Bharat Ratra will describe the astronomical data which persuade cosmologists that dark energy and dark matter are by far (as yet undetected) the main components of the energy budget of the Universe at the present time.

He will review how these observations have led to the development of a quantitative "standard" model of cosmology that describes the evolution of the universe from an early epoch of inflation to the complex hierarchy of structure seen today. In this talk, he will also discuss the basic physics, and the history of ideas, on which this model is based.

• Location:  The Municipal Library of Prague, Small Hall, Mariánské náměstí 1, Prague 1 
• Admission: Free 
• Language: English