Ramanujan Auditorium

How to survive in our strange universe

Ashoke Sen

HRI, Allahabad

The discovery that most of the energy density in the universe is stored in the form of dark energy has profound consequences for our future. In particular our current limited understanding of quantum theory of gravity indicates that some time in the future our universe will undergo a phase transition that will destroy us and everything else around us instantaneously. However the laws of gravity also suggest a way out -- some of our descendants could survive this catastrophe by riding gravity away from the danger. In this talk I shall describe the story of this escape.

This will be based on a popular article I wrote some time ago that can be found at

arxiv.org/pdf/1503.08130v1.pdf