2025 Annual Burbidge Dinner

The after dinner speaker for this year’s Burbidge Dinner will be Professor Geraint Lewis.

Heavenly Tensions: Is modern cosmology in crisis?

In this talk, Professor Lewis will explore the growing tensions in modern cosmology—observational discrepancies that may signal cracks in the standard model. He will start with the Hubble tension, a persistent mismatch between early- and late-universe measurements of the expansion rate, which challenges our understanding of cosmic history. From there, we will examine the cosmological principle, the assumption of large-scale uniformity, and how emerging evidence of dipole anisotropies—directional patterns in distributions of galaxies—may undermine this foundational idea. He will conclude with a “state of the nation” overview, assessing whether cosmology is facing a genuine crisis or simply entering a new phase of discovery. 

Geraint F. Lewis was born in Old South Wales and studied astrophysics at the University of London before earning his PhD from Cambridge in 1995. After research positions in the US and Canada, he moved to Australia in 2000, where he is now Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Sydney. His research spans the influence of dark energy and dark matter on cosmic evolution, the use of gravitational lensing to probe the nature of quasars and the distribution of dark matter, and the dynamics of galactic cannibalism in the Local Group. Geraint is also a passionate science communicator, with several books and numerous public talks exploring the deep questions of cosmology, physics and the meaning of reality.

• Ticket prices:
  • Members Early Bird price (paid by 17 Oct): $65
  • Members price after 17 Oct: $75
  • Non-members: $75 earlybird, $85 after 17 Oct.

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