Daniel Holz, PhD, an astrophysicist from the Los Alamos National Labo-ratory in New Mexico, USA, delivered a public lecture titled “An Accelerated His-tory of the Universe” at the College of Science (CS) Auditorium in UP Diliman on June 15.

The lecture is the first in the College’s Science, Technology and Society (STS) Public Lecture Series for the semester. The STS Public Lectures are aimed at demonstrating the importance of the sciences in our day-to-day lives.

Holz described his lecture as an overview of cosmology—the study of the entire universe from beginning to end—and where that scientific field is going in the coming decades. He said that cosmologists have a “beautiful theory” that can describe everything that has happened in the universe, and that is The Big Bang Model which is founded on Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity.

Prof. Holz

He said that with a combination of this theory and experiments, cosmologists have found answers to some questions about the universe such as how big and how old it is, what it is made of, and what its ultimate fate is. He said that cosmologists have found that the universe is roughly 13.8 billion years old, has a temperature of 3 degrees below absolute zero, and that it is 1.3 x 1023 km across.
And with the use of equipment like the Hubble Space Telescope and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, we are able to see deeper into the universe than we have ever done.

Holz said that in his opinion, the most exciting studies in cosmology in the coming decades will have to do with research into dark matter and dark energy, which toge-ther make up roughly 95 percent of the universe, but which we know nothing about.

After his presentation, Holz answered questions from the audience. The questions ranged from why he became a theoretical physicist and cosmologist to his opinions on popular science fiction concepts like time travel and parallel universes.

Holz received a bachelor’s degree in Physics from Princeton University in 1992, and his graduate degree from the Univer-sity of Chicago in 1998. He did postdoc-toral research at the Albert Einstein Institute (Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics) in Potsdam, Germany, and at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara. He became a Center Fellow at the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics in Chicago and in 2004, he became a Richard Feynman Fellow in the Theoretical Astrophysics and Theoretical Particle Physics groups at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

At present he is a Senior Research As-sociate in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago, as a staff member at Los Ala-mos in the Nuclear, Particle, Astro, & Cosmology group.