Speaker: David Weinberg (Ohio State University Astronomy)

Since 2004, David Weinberg has been collaborating with artist Josiah McElheny on the design of cosmologically inspired sculptures, which represent the history of the expanding universe and the formation of structure within it. In this talk, he will describe these sculptures and the astronomical concepts that underlie them, which include the nature of cosmic expansion, the transition from an opaque universe to a transparent universe, the formation and clustering of galaxies and quasars, the seeding of cosmic structure by primordial fluctuations in the early universe, and the possibility that our observable cosmos is only an "island" in a larger "multiverse." The sculptures that have emerged from this collaboration have been exhibited in galleries and museums across the U.S. and Europe.