Amateur Astronomers Association of Princeton (AAAP) Monthly Meeting
Journey to the Cosmic Web and Back to Earth
Professor J. Richard Gott will tell how his high school science project on spongelike polyhedra led him to a new understanding of the large-scale structure of the universe. If the large-scale structure was seeded by random quantum fluctuations in the inflationary early universe, then the topology of its large-scale structure should look spongelike today. This spongelike structure, with clusters of galaxies connected by filaments of galaxies, has been confirmed many times and is now known as the Cosmic Web. Prof. Gott will also tell how a new kind of polyhedron he discovered recently led him to make (with Goldberg and Vanderbei) the most accurate flat map of Earth yet. It was picked by TIME as one of the 100 best inventions of 2021 and featured on the cover.