Is the UNIVERSE infinite? by Anna Iudintseva in Washington

Anna Yudintseva — a scientist and space systems engineer — is launching her East Coast tour as a part of the U.S. tour.Just how strange can the Universe really be?Why can time move at different speeds for different observers? Can we “see” the beginning of time? How does gravity bend space, and why are scientists building massive detectors to listen to black holes colliding billions of light-years away? And finally — is the Universe truly infinite?In this lecture, Anna Yudintseva will explain, in a clear and accessible way, the nature of space and time, gravity and gravitational waves, the structure of the Universe, and how modern experiments allow scientists to test ideas that once existed only in theory.Anna works at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where she contributes to the design of Cosmic Explorer — a next-generation gravitational-wave detector — and develops the CEBEX prototype at the LIGO Observatory.In September 2015, LIGO made the first-ever direct detection of gravitational waves produced by the merger of two black holes — an event that opened an entirely new way of observing the Universe. The 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for key contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves.This is a lecture about how modern science is trying to answer some of the biggest questions of all: What is time? How is space structured? And does the Universe have an edge?