# Video Library

Since 2002 Perimeter Institute has been recording seminars, conference talks, public outreach events such as talks from top scientists using video cameras installed in our lecture theatres.  Perimeter now has 7 formal presentation spaces for its many scientific conferences, seminars, workshops and educational outreach activities, all with advanced audio-visual technical capabilities.

Recordings of events in these areas are all available and On-Demand from this Video Library and on Perimeter Institute Recorded Seminar Archive (PIRSA)PIRSA is a permanent, free, searchable, and citable archive of recorded seminars from relevant bodies in physics. This resource has been partially modelled after Cornell University's arXiv.org.

Accessibly by anyone with internet, Perimeter aims to share the power and wonder of science with this free library.

## What Happens When Entropy Decreases

Saturday Jul 16, 2011
Speaker(s):

Closed systems never evolve to lower entropy states -- except when they do, which is if one waits a time that is exponential in the entropy change. Thus macroscopic decreases in entropy are 'never' observed. Yet in cosmology there are eternal systems in which downward entropy fluctuations of any magnitude eventually happen. What is the nature of such fluctuations?

Scientific Areas:

## Observable signatures of anisotropic bubble nucleation

Friday Jul 15, 2011

Our universe may have formed via bubble nucleation in an eternally-inflating background. Furthermore, the background may have a compact dimension---the modulus of which tunnels out of a metastable minimum during bubble nucleation---which subsequently grows to become one of our three large spatial dimensions. We discuss some potential observational signatures of this scenario.

Scientific Areas:

## Galilean Genesis

Friday Jul 15, 2011
Speaker(s):

We propose a novel cosmological scenario, in which standard inflation is replaced by an expanding phase with a drastic violation of the Null Energy Condition (NEC): \dot H >> H^2. The model is based on the recently introduced Galileon theories, which allow NEC violating solutions without instabilities. The unperturbed solution describes a Universe that is asymptotically Minkowski in the past, expands with increasing energy density until it exits the regime of validity of the effective field theory and reheats.

Scientific Areas:

## Infrared Challenges for Inflation

Friday Jul 15, 2011
Speaker(s):

I will review some recent work on infrared issues for scalar fields in exact and quasi de Sitter space. Renewed interest in this topic has been driven by the observational potential for a more accurate determination of statistics of the primordial curvature perturbations, especially non-Gaussianity. Interestingly, the resulting questions are not only relevant for mapping inflationary models to observation but also link directly to more fundamental questions about the initial state, eternal inflation, and the long time dynamics of interacting quantum fields in curved space.

Scientific Areas:

## A Simple Harmonic Universe

Friday Jul 15, 2011

We explore simple but novel solutions of general relativity which, classically, approximate cosmologies cycling through an infinite set of bounces." These solutions require curvature K=+1, and are supported by a negative cosmological term and matter with -1 < w < -1/3. They can be studied within the regime of validity of general relativity. We argue that quantum mechanically, particle production leads eventually to a departure from the regime of validity of semiclassical general relativity, likely yielding a singular crunch.

Scientific Areas:

## Holographic Cosmology Inflation and Entropy

Friday Jul 15, 2011
Speaker(s):

I provide a mathematical model of holographic cosmology whose coarse grained description is that of a homogeneous isotropic, flat universe, which makes a transitions from an FRW to an eternal de Sitter regime.&nbsp;Based on this model, I suggest some heuristic ideas which explain the low initial entropy of the universe and may provide a description of an inflationary era with small fluctuations.

Scientific Areas:

## Probability and Anthropic Reasoning in Small, Large, and Infinite Universes

Friday Jul 15, 2011
Speaker(s):

I will argue that anthropic reasoning is unnecessary or misleading when the universe/multiverse is small enough that another observer with exactly your memories is unlikely to exist. Instead, one can evaluate theories or make predictions in the standard Bayesian way, based on the conditional probability of something unknown given all that you do know. Things are not so clear when the universe is large enough that all competing theories predict that an observer with your exact memories exists with probability close to one.

Scientific Areas:

## TBA

Friday Jul 15, 2011
Speaker(s):

TBA

Scientific Areas:

## Inflationary Cosmology: A Holographic Perspective

Thursday Jul 14, 2011
Speaker(s):

We present a holographic framework for inflationary universes, in particular those that are either asymptotically de Sitter or asymptotically power-law. This framework reveals how cosmological observables, including the primordial power spectrum and non-Gaussianities, are encoded in the correlation functions of a three-dimensional non-gravitational quantum field theory. Introducing a simple yet general class of holographic models, we obtain distinctive observational predictions that are compatible with current observational data and may be either confirmed or excluded by Planck.

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## Curvature and Anisotropy Near a Nonsingular Bounce

Thursday Jul 14, 2011
Speaker(s):

Problematic growths of curvature and anisotropy are found in nonsingular bouncing cosmologies that include both an ekpyrotic phase and a bouncing phase. Classically, initial curvature and anisotropy that are suppressed during the ekpyrotic phase will grow back exponentially during the nonsingular bouncing phase. Besides, curvature perturbations and anisotropy are generated by quantum fluctuations during the ekpyrotic phase. In the bouncing phase, an adiabatic curvature perturbation grows to dominate and gives rise to a blue spectrum that spoils the scale-invariance.

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## Next Public Lecture

### JOCELYN BELL BURNELL: UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

Thursday Oct 25, 2018

## LECTURES ON-DEMAND

### Avery Broderick: Perimeter Institute and University of Waterloo

Speaker: Avery Broderick