'The State of the Universe' scientific conference and the public symposium were 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 event 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.

Latest episodes of the podcast The State of the Universe - Stephen Hawking 70th Birthday Symposium

• Alan Guth. Eternal Inflation and Its Implications.
• Alexander Vilenkin. Did the universe have a beginning?
• Andrei Linde. Inflation in supergravity and string theory
• Andrew Strominger. Microscopic Realization of the dS/CFT Correspondence
• Bruce Allen. The Einstein@Home search for gravitational waves and neutron stars
• Daniel Eisenstein. Dark Energy and Cosmic Sound
• David Spergel. The State of the Universe: 380,000 Years After the Big Bang
• Frank Wilczek. Time Crystals
• Gary Gibbons. Conformal Symmetry and Scaling Limits of Black Holes
• Gary Horowitz. Instability of Anti-de Sitter
• Harvey Reall. Black holes and extra dimensions
• Hermann Nicolai. Consistent Kaluza Klein universes from maximal supergravity
• James Hartle. The State of the No Boundary Wave Function
• James Sparks. The Nuts and Bolts of AdS/CFT
• Juan Maldacena. The constraining power of higher spin symmetry
• Kip Thorne. Black Holes: A New Golden Age
• Lord Rees. From planets to universes
• Luis Lehner. Black holes & membranes: observables & surprises?
• Michael Green. Scattering Amplitudes in String and Field Theory
• Neil Turok. The Big Crunch/Big Bang Transition
• Raphael Bousso. The State of the Multiverse
• Renata Kallosh. N=8 supergravity
• Saul Perlmutter. Supernova, Dark Energy and the Accelerating Universe
• Shing-Tung Yau. Quasi Local Mass and Momentum in General Relativity
• Simon Ross. Holography and black holes
• Stephen Hawking. A Brief History of Mine
• Thomas Hertog. A new twist on the no-boundary state