Profs & Pints Annapolis: Rethinking the Universe

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Photo by NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI.

A James Webb Space Telescope image of the Cartwheel Galaxy, the product of a collision between a large spiral galaxy and a smaller one not pictured here. Photo by NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI.

Profs and Pints Annapolis presents: “Rethinking the Universe,” on how the James Webb Space Telescope and other instruments are changing our understanding of the cosmos and Earth, with Jeffrey Larsen and Christopher Morgan, astrophysicists at the United States Naval Academy.

We’ve entered a new age of astronomical wonder thanks to the latest generation of astronomical telescopes, including the James Webb Space Telescope, the LIGO/Virgo gravitational wave telescopes, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, and the Dark Energy Camera.

Come to the Graduate Annapolis hotel to learn about the scientific basis for—and the latest observational results from—the very newest and most advanced telescopes in the world. Your guides on this journey of interstellar understanding will Naval Academy observational astrophysicists Dr. Jeffrey Larsen, who also researches planetary science and galactic structure, and Dr. Christopher Morgan, who also researches gravitational lensing and quasar physics. They’ll make some incredibly advanced science understandable to equip you to fully appreciate the groundbreaking discoveries being made by these new scientific instruments.

The two scholars will discuss how what we’re learning about what happens out there is changing our understanding of how and why things happen here. Underlying that dynamic is the so-called “cosmological principle,” which assumes that the same laws of physics apply everywhere. Critical to nearly all the discoveries of modern astronomical science, it means that we can use what we’ve learned from physics experiments here on Earth to interpret what we see beyond our planet, but it also goes both ways, meaning that what we observe in the cosmos shapes our understanding of physics here on Earth. The upshot is that the new telescopes are challenging some of our assumptions about how things around us work.

Professor Larsen and Professor Morgan also will offer sneak previews of advanced telescopes that will be coming online within the next decade. They’ll be donating their proceeds to the U.S. Metric Association. (Advance tickets: $12 plus sales tax and vendor fees. Doors: $15, or $13 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later. Please allow yourself time to place any orders and get seated and settled in.)