Tuesday 16 June, 12 noon
ICI London and International Balzan Foundation present
The Future of Cosmology
A dialogue between Joseph Silk (2011 Balzan Prizewinner for the Early Universe) and Paolo de Bernardis (2006 Balzan Prizewinner for Observational Astronomy and Astrophysics).
Opening remarks by Francesco Bongarrà, Director, ICI London; Nicolò Biscottini, First Secretary, Italian Embassy; and Frances Ashcroft Balzan General Prize Committee.
Modern cosmology is no longer confined to Earth. To understand the birth and evolution of our universe, we are venturing to the most isolated pockets of our solar system. This quest is defined by two parallel frontiers: the search for the “First Light” and the exploration of the “Dark Ages.”
Experimentalists are now developing cutting edge, remote ground-based telescopes and a new satellite to launch to the ambitious L2 Lagrange point. They will scan the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) for the ultimate prize: B-mode polarization. These faint swirls in the oldest light are the potential fingerprints of primordial gravitational waves, offering a direct window into the first trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.
At the same time, we are looking toward the Far Side of the Moon to solve the mystery of the Dark Ages ― the era before the first stars. By building radio telescopes in the Moon’s radio-silent shadow, we aim to detect ultra-long radio waves from ancient hydrogen clouds. Together, these measurements represent a pincer maneuver on the unknown: one refining our view of the infant universe’s light, the other illuminating the structures that grew from the darkness.
Joseph Silk and Paolo De Bernardis will discuss the extreme engineering and theoretical precision required to extract these cosmic truths from an overwhelming background of local noise.
Book your place HERE
Paolo de Bernardis is a Full Professor of Astrophysics at Sapienza University of Rome. He is a member of both the Accademia dei Lincei and the National Academy of Sciences (Italy), and serves on the General Prize Committee of the International Balzan Prize Foundation.
An experimentalist by training, his research is dedicated to the study of the universe and its evolution. He served as the international coordinator for the BOOMERanG experiment, which—via a long-duration stratospheric balloon flight over Antarctica in 1998—captured the first detailed image of the primordial universe. He was also a Co-Investigator for the Planck space mission, which mapped the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and the millimeter sky with unprecedented precision.
Currently, Professor de Bernardis is the scientific coordinator for MISTRAL, an instrument at the Sardinia Radio Telescope that utilizes innovative kinetic inductance detectors for high-resolution studies of galaxy clusters. He is also leading the development of the COSMO experiment at Dome-C, Antarctica, to measure spectral distortions in the CMB.
With over 700 scientific publications to his credit, his contributions have been recognized with several prestigious honors, including the Feltrinelli Prize (2001), the Balzan Prize (2006), the Dan David Prize (2009), and the Cocconi Prize (2011). He has also authored four books for a general audience, including his latest work, Tutti i colori del corpo nero (2025).
Jospeh Silk is Homewood Researh Professor of Physics and Astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and emeritus researcher at the Institut d’Astrophysique (CNRS and Sorbonne University, Paris). He was previously Savilian Professor of Astronomy at the University of Oxford, where he currently is a Senior Fellow at the Beecroft Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, and Professor of Astronomy and Physics at the University of California at Berkeley. Most of his scientific research is related to cosmology and particle astrophysics, including the cosmic microwave background radiation, galaxy formation and dark matter. He is best known for his seminal prediction of the imprint of primordial density fluctuations on the angular structure of the cosmic microwave background radiation, including the eponymous damping scale that that traces the interaction of baryonic matter with the radiation. Recent experiments have confirmed these predictions with high precision. He is the author or coauthor of more than 800 papers in refereed journals, seven popular books, including The Big Bang (2001) and Back to the Moon (2025). Silk is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences. His awards include the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Bakerian Lectureship of the Royal Society, the International Balzan Prize, the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship of the American Astronomical Society, the Gruber Prize in Cosmology, and the Amaldi Award of the Italian Society for General Relativity and Gravitation Physics. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Institute of Physics, the Royal Astronomical Society, and an honorary member of the French Physical Society.