CIERA’s 11th annual public lecture was presented by award-winning author and Yale professor Dr. Priyamvada Natarajan at Cahn Auditorium on October 24. Natarajan gave her talk, Cartography of the Cosmos: Mapping the Unseen, to an audience of about 250 people.
Natarajan discussed how mapping over time encodes radical new scientific ideas. She walked through the history of the acceptance of new astronomical ideas, and talked about the status of several current transformative (and deeply contested) ideas. She explained that the arc of their acceptance reveals not only our own shifting conceptions of the cosmos, but also shows how science works.
The talk also included an “Ask an Astronomer” component, similar to a meet-and-greet that directly connected the public audience to working researchers. Graduate students and postdoctoral researchers from CIERA engaged with audience members at different tables that allowed them to learn more about cosmology, as well as careers in astronomy.
Learn more about the CIERA Annual Public Lectures.