Jean-Philippe Uzan

Biography

Jean-Philippe Uzan is Director of Research in Theoretical Physics at the CNRS. A specialist in gravitation and cosmology, he works at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics. He was deputy director of the Institut Henri Poincaré from 2013 to 2017. He has published over a hundred research papers on many aspects of cosmology, from the most theoretical to the interpretation of the most recent observations. He has been awarded the Paul Langevin Prize (2010) and the prestigious Georges Lemaître Prize (2015). He taught for several years at the École normale supérieure de Paris and the École des mines de Paris, as well as in international thematic schools. For the past fifteen years, he has been collaborating with the University of Cape Town in South Africa. In 2017, he published L’harmonie secrète de l’univers and Big-bang in 2018.

Conference: Is the Universe 13.8 Ma old?

In the space of a century, cosmology has been able to formulate a standard model describing the history, evolution and structure of our universe. It concludes, among other things, that the universe is 13.8 billion years old. What does such a statement mean, what does it presuppose and on what observations is it based? This talk will describe the particularities of cosmology in order to clarify the scope and limits of these assertions about our universe.