The Real Big Bang Theory #Pint2014 Review by Phil

My Dear Sexy Readers,

During the Pint of Science festival, I was lucky enough to go to the very popular and sold out talk by Prof John Ellis entitled 'Blowing up the Universe'. What a treat, I felt so privileged to see that eminent scientist explain the Big Bang Theory to us in the amazing surrounding of a central London pub! Very surreal! I got home, super psyched and shaking from adrenaline!

If you don't know who Prof John Ellis is, let me tell you he's one of those people who will be mentioned in Physics book in at least the next 200 years for his involvement in understanding our Universe and of course the extraordinary CERN's Large Hadron Collider. 

So, my Sexy Readers, let me introduce to you Sexy Scientist Phil who was there with me that night, and knowing his larger memory capacity, I thought it would only be fair to Prof John Ellis to ask a brighter mind to summarize our evening! Here is his review:

Prof John Ellis

In ‘Blowing Up The Universe’ Prof John Ellis took us on a journey through the ever expanding Universe. 

It turns out that the Universe has been expanding ever since it came into being with a great Big Bang, and that we are in a period of exceptionally rapid inflation right now. 
Curiously, all the exciting stuff in the Universe seems to have happened in the very first few fractions of a second, even before most particles let alone atoms ever existed. 

The problem is that 13.8 billion years later, it’s not entirely trivial to work out what exactly did happen back then. Clever people like John Ellis give it a go anyway; they come up with theories for which they amazingly sometimes even find evidence in the here and now. 

BICEP2 telescope in the South Pole from HERE

For example, a good chunk of the white noise you get with a badly tuned TV set is caused by cosmic background radiation which originated at the time of the Big Bang. 
As if this was not proof enough, the aptly named BICEP2 experiments (basically a huge telescope at the South Pole) has recently measured this in a slightly more sophisticated fashion than a 60s TV set and now found definite proof for the ultra-rapid expansion of the early Universe – unless of course the measurements were contaminated by galactic dust (star dust’s ugly sibling) which apparently is a real possibility. 

John Ellis was a very engaging and entertaining speaker and I really enjoyed the talk, although I won’t claim for a second that I understood even half of what he said. 

To answer the question why the Universe only ever expands and never contracts, he produced my favourite analogy: the Universe is a bank you can withdraw money from that you never have to pay back. 
Now that is my sort of bank!

"A" Big Bang Theory - by

Thank you Sexy Phil for your review. I hope you, my Sexy Readers, found it interesting and that you wouldn't want to miss talks down the pub by such eminent Scientists!!

I have to mention that the evening then turned into a Physics stand up comedy with the very funny and of course Sexy, Lieven Scheire who explained some Physics to us using humour! Very entertaining indeed, and I hope to see my fellow Belgian again very soon,

See you Soon for more Sexy Science,