Join Professor Bernard Carr for a special public lecture exploring both the outer universe of black holes, cosmology, and the inner universe of mind, consciousness and meaning. Drawing on a lifetime of work at the frontiers of physics, Professor Carr will examine whether our current scientific picture of reality is complete - or whether it may need to expand to better account for consciousness itself. The lecture will be followed by a special dialogue with Venerable Ajahn Brahm on science, spirituality and the deeper questions of human experience.
Professor Carr's research interests include the early universe, dark matter, general relativity, primordial black holes, and the anthropic principle. He studied relativity and cosmology under Stephen Hawking at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology. He was the president of the Cambridge University Buddhist Society and was friends with Ajahn Brahm, a fellow student and Buddhist Monk.
In 1976 he was elected to a Fellowship at Trinity and became an advanced SERC fellow at the Institute of Astronomy. In 1979 he was awarded a Lindemann Fellowship for post-doctoral research in America. In 1980 he took up a Senior Research Fellowship at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge. In 1985 he moved to the then Queen Mary College, University of London, where he is now Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy.
This public lecture is part of the Black Swan Summit Australia and is presented by the UWA Data Institute and UWA Institute of Advanced Studies.