Considering the Heavens: a Night of Meaning

Our place in the Universe, the Cosmos, the Creation: it is tempting to interpret what’s out there as having meaning for us down here, inside each of us. The modern academy studies the Universe but rarely asks what is the meaning of it all? In this lecture we’ll get up-to-date on what’s known in Astrophysics – from cosmology to exoplanets – discover why some previous impositions of meaning are now essentially ruled out, and discuss what options are still open for interpreting the night sky and its billions upon billions of stars.  What can Christians bring to the conversation?

Talk by Dr. Daniel Fabrycky, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Chicago. Professor Fabrycky studies the dynamics of extrasolar planets. Over the past two decades, discoveries of planets orbiting other stars have poured in from a variety of different detection techniques, and the resulting menagerie of planetary types and system architectures poses many theoretical issues. Fabrycky studies how the observations constrain the configurations of these exoplanetary systems, as well as how gravitational interactions, tidal effects, and energy dissipation shape them.