Speaker: Daniel Baumann (Amsterdam)
Cosmology
is famously an observational rather than an experimental science. No
experimentalists were present in the early universe, and the birth and
subsequent evolution of the universe cannot be repeated. Instead, we can
only measure the spatial correlations between cosmological structures
at late times. A central challenge of modern cosmology is to construct a
consistent history of the universe that explains these correlations. In
this colloquium, I will describe a new approach to determine
cosmological correlations from consistency conditions alone, following a
perspective familiar from the study of scattering amplitudes. I will
present an intriguing connection between scattering amplitudes and
cosmological correlators, and discuss how recent breakthroughs in the
field of scattering amplitudes could lead to new insights into the
structure of cosmological correlations.