'The State of the Universe' conference was held in Cambridge UK, to celebrate the 70th birthday of Professor Stephen Hawking. The conference was hosted by the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology (DAMTP) at the Centre for Mathematical Sciences in the University of Cambridge. We were very pleased to be able to hold this remarkable event for Professor Hawking whose courage, insight and vision continues to have such an impact on the way we all understand fundamental physics at the extremes in black holes and the Big Bang. A major goal of the conference was to review the current status of the fields of black holes, cosmology and fundamental physics; the 27 invited speakers are all world leaders in these fields.

Videos of talks now online

Intel Studios provided live coverage of all the talks at the conference. Please click here to see videos of the talks.

Public Symposium

The scientific conference was followed by a public symposium on Sunday 8th January 2012 - please click here to go to the website for this event.

Conference invited speakers:

Bruce Allen (Albert Einstein Institute, Hannover)
Raphael Bousso (UC Berkeley)
Daniel Eisenstein (University of Arizona)
Gary Gibbons (University of Cambridge)
Michael Green (University of Cambridge)
Alan Guth (MIT)
James Hartle (UC Santa Barbara)
Stephen Hawking (University of Cambridge)
Thomas Hertog (University of Leuven)
Gary Horowitz (UC Santa Barbara)
Renata Kallosh (Stanford University)
Luis Lehner (Perimeter Institute / Guelph)
Andrei Linde (Stanford University)

Juan Maldacena (IAS, Princeton)
Hermann Nicolai (AEI, Golm)
Saul Perlmutter (UC Berkeley)
Harvey Reall (University of Cambridge)
Martin Rees (University of Cambridge)
Simon Ross (Durham University)
David Spergel (Princeton University)
James Sparks (Oxford University)
Andrew Strominger (Harvard University)
Kip Thorne (Caltech)
Neil Turok (Perimeter Institute)
Alexander Vilenkin (Tufts University)
Frank Wilczek (MIT)
Shing-Tung Yau (Harvard University)

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