On Wednesday, March 23rd, 50 Cathedral students traveled to the Kyoto symposium at UCSD to hear from Rashid Sunyaev, Ph.D., a world-renowned cosmologist and astrophysicist. The two-and-half- hour presentation by Sunyaev focused on his discoveries in cosmology and his background. Sunyaev is the recent recipient of the Kyoto Prize, which is the Japanese equivalent of the Nobel Prize, for his achievements in “basic sciences.”
The significance of the speaker was made evident to unsuspecting Cathedral students when they walked into an auditorium packed with over 1,000 people.
“We got to meet a rock star of the rocket science world,” said Cathedral chemistry teacher Mr. Stephen Anderson.
And he truly is; Sunyaev is currently director of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany and chief scientist at the Space Research Institute. He is also the Maureen and John Hendricks Visiting Professor in the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
A surprising 45 minutes was taken to describe his background, family, and country of origin. After this introduction, Sunyaev dove into the actual content. The main focus being the “big bang theory”, which he summarized as being the idea that the universe formed some 14 billion years ago due to the collapse of massive amounts of matter and has been expanding ever since this huge explosion.
He also briefly touched on the Doppler effect and on cosmic microwave background radiation. Although well spoken, Sunyaev had a fairly thick accent that created a language barrier, and many students had to listen carefully to catch everything he said.
After Sunyaev finished, he opened the floor to questions. For a few seconds, everyone just looked around in intimidated silence. Then, a single hand was raised. A bold Cathedral junior named Anthony Westfall raised his hand, walked up to the microphone at the front of the room and asked his question. “Based on yours and Hubble’s findings, was the universe, at one point, zero dimensional?” Sunyaev began to answer, and after 5 minutes told Anthony that he would explain it to him further after the symposium.