Programme information:

  • For invited participants and speakers, the meeting begins with a reception and light meal on the evening of Sunday 16th December at Gonville and Caius College. Otherwise the meeting formally starts at 9:30am on Monday 17th December. The meeting finishes after lunch on Thursday 20th December, but all participants and speakers are welcome to stay at the Centre for Mathematical Sciences until the end of the week.

  • All workshop sessions will be held in Meeting Room 2 of the Centre for Mathematical Sciences, downstairs in the Central Core. During the meeting there will also be a launch event for the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology in the newly refurbished Common Room in Pavilion B, the focal point for CTC activities.

  • Lunches will be provided in the Central Core of the CMS for invited speakers and participants (i.e. white badge holders). All other participants can purchase their lunch (sandwiches, soup etc) at the cafeteria, also in the Central Core. The banquet will be held on the evening of Wednesday 19th December 2007. If you have special dietary requirements please email VEU_workshop@damtp.cam.ac.uk

  • Access to the lectures is restricted to those who have badges - white, blue or red. Registration is now closed, however, there is an overflow room with both audio/video of the speaker, as well as a separate screen showing the powerpoint.

  • There will also be live streaming of the lectures on the internet. If you wish to view this in real time, then please follow these instructions:

    Go to the website - http://131.111.20.147/
    1.Enter sign in name (any will do)
    2.Conference ID is: 0796
    3.Select High or Low bandwidth
    4.Select stream this conference

    [N.B Browser required: Firefox or Windows IE with Quicktime and cookies enabled.] Many thanks to Adrian Cullum-Hinshaw, Cambridge eScience and the CMS team for making this webcast possible.

Workshop schedule:

Sunday 16th December

7:00pm Reception - Combination Room, Gonville and Caius College, Trinity Street.
(NB: A light buffet meal will be served. The venue constrains this event to invited participants and speakers only; these can obtain directions to the old college site in the centre of Cambridge from the Porters Lodge at Stephen Hawking House.)

Monday 17th December

Venue: Wolfson Room (MR2), Central Core, Centre for Mathematical Sciences.

9:30 Alan Guth (MIT) Inflation 25 years after the VEU workshop
10:05 Alexei Starobinsky (Landau) Stochastic inflation and the role of initial conditions
10:40 Demos Kazanas (NASA) Inflation - a Personal Perspective
11:15 MORNING COFFEE
11:45 Stephen Hawking (Cambridge) Why did the Universe inflate?
12:20 Andrei Linde (Stanford) Inflationary paradigm
12:55 LUNCH
14:10 Katsuhiko Sato (Tokyo) Inflation before Inflation: From Supernovae to Multiproduction of Universes
14:45 Paul Steinhardt (Princeton) Inflationary and Cyclic Models of the Universe
15:20 Slava Mukhanov (Munich) Cosmological Perturbations: Theory vs. Observations
15:55 AFTERNOON TEA
16:25 Jim Bardeen (Washington) Backreaction as an explanation for dark energy
17:00 Henry Tye (Cornell) Brane Inflation: an Update
17:35 Ian Moss (Newcastle) Interpreting the Hartle-Hawking state
18:10 FINISH

Tuesday 18th December

9:30 Frank Wilczek (MIT) 25 years of Axion Cosmology
10:05 Dick Bond (CITA) Constraining Inflation Trajectories, Now and Then
10:40 Andrew Liddle (Sussex) Evidence for Inflation
11:15 MORNING COFFEE
11:45 George Smoot (Berkeley) Anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Sky (tbc)
12:20 David Spergel (Princeton) Cosmology after WMAP
12:55 LUNCH Central core
14:10 Jim Hartle (Santa Barbara) The Classical Universes of the No-Boundary Quantum State
14:45 Don Page (Alberta) Boundary conditions for the Universe
15:20 Brett McInnes (Singapore) Creating a Universe with an Arrow of Time
15:55 AFTERNOON TEA
16:25 David Lyth (Lancaster) Black hole creation at the end of inflation
17:00 Gia Dvali (New York) Black holes and particle species
17:35 Ed Copeland (Nottingham) Cosmic superstrings
18:10 FINISH

Wednesday 19th December

9:30 Cliff Burgess (Perimeter) String inflation
10:05 Renata Kallosh (Stanford) Cosmology and Fundamental Physics
10:40 Eva Silverstein (Stanford) Hubble expansion and the degrees of freedom of string theory
11:15 MORNING COFFEE
11:45 Shamit Kachru (Stanford) Comments on Inflation in String Theory
12:20 Thomas Hertog (APC) AdS/CFT Dual Description of Cosmological Singularities
12:55 LUNCH Central core
14:00 Neil Turok (Cambridge) From Big Crunch to Big Bang with AdS/CFT
14:35 Justin Khoury (Perimeter) New Ekpyrotic Cosmology and Non-Gaussianity
15:10 Robert Brandenberger (McGill) Towards an Alternative to Inflation based on String Theory
15:45 Ben Wandelt (Illinois) Primordial Non-Gaussianity in WMAP 3-year data
16:20 AFTERNOON TEA
17:00 CTC Launch Event See location and programme details below
19:30 BANQUET Trinity College Dining Hall (see information page)

Thursday 20th December

9:30 Paul Shellard (Cambridge) Non-Gaussianity from the early universe
10:05 Gary Gibbons (Cambridge) Priors
10:40 Alex Vilenkin (Tufts) Measures of the Multiverse
11:15 MORNING COFFEE
11:45 Rocky Kolb (Chicago) WIMPZILLAS: Producing dark matter during inflation
12:20 Michael Turner (Chicago) Workshop Summary
12:55 LUNCH Central core

Please note that speakers and all participants are welcome to stay on until the end of the week.

Centre for Theoretical Cosmology Launch

5:00pm, Wednesday 19th December - Pavilion B Common Room

Please note that the venue will only be able to accommodate the invited participants and speakers (i.e. white badge holders only), together with guests and media specifically invited for the launch.

17:00 Welcome - Professor Peter Haynes, Head of DAMTP
17:05 Introduction and unveiling - Professor Alison Richard, Vice-Chancellor
17:15 Drinks
17:45 Centre for Theoretical Cosmology - Professor Stephen Hawking
17:55 Professor Neil Turok, CTC Director
18:10 Drinks/Tour of CMS

The banquet follows soon afterwards at 7:30pm in the Trinity College Dining Hall; please ensure that you are at the college by 7:20pm. Refer to the information page for the menu and the location page for a map.