Flamsteed Astronomy Society

Dr Ali Mozaffari

Flamsteed lecture by Dr Ali Mozaffari from Imperial College London and 15th Annual General Meeting of the Flamsteed Astronomy Society.

Dr Ali Mozaffari was a researcher in Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London and is currently an associate lecturer at the Open University.  From an early age, he has been fascinated by the beginnings of the Universe and the fundamental forces that govern nature.  His work touches upon the Cosmology and Einstein’s theories, as well as developing ways to detect potential deviations from them.  Outside of academia, he is interested in the arts, especially the theatre and very much enjoys making connections between his own and other disciplines as a way of raising public awareness in the sciences.

Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (GR) represents one of the key milestones in 20th century science, matching observations on a wide range of scales with ever increasing accuracy. In the last thirty years, interest has been centred around the so-called “Dark Sector”, comprising Dark Matter and Dark Energy. Whilst these ideas could work in harmony with GR to explain current observations, our poor understanding of them directly has led some to suggest alternative models mayneed to be developed. In this talk, Ali will outline the idea of modifying gravity instead and suggest potential ways to test it, within the next few years.