Space: The final frontier Carlos Frenk, Catherine Heymans and Stephanie Flanders (chair)
Event details
Is there anybody out there? As we hurtle through the 21st century, grabbing at new inventions and technologies that forever change the way we think and behave, our speakers consider the bigger questions of the day.
With Astronomer Royal for Scotland Catherine Heymans and cosmologist Carlos Frenk, our panel asks where our knowledge, gleaned from our own small blue planet, fits in the vastness of an ever-expanding universe.
Keynote: 10.30am to 11.15am
Panel: 11.30am to 12.45pm
This event is part of the Festival Focus series ‘From Brownfield to Blue Sky’ presented in partnership with York Central. You may also be interested in ‘Place: The sky’s the limit’ on Thursday 4 June from 1.45pm to 4pm.
About York Central
York Central is the UK’s largest brownfield regeneration site and will be pivotal in the city’s history, adding a new urban quarter of homes, commercial development and public spaces to an unparalleled ancient built environment.
About the speakers
Carlos Frenk is Ogden Professor of Fundamental Physics, founder, in 2002, of Durham University’s Institute for Computational Cosmology, of which he was Director until 2020. He is one of the originators of the 'Cold dark matter' theory of the formation of cosmic structures, specialising on supercomputer simulations and semi-analytic models of the evolution of the universe. He has published over 600 scientific refereed papers which have been cited over 150,000 times. Carlos was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2004 and has received numerous prizes, including the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Rumford medal of the Royal Society, the Dirac medal of the Institute of Physics, the Max Born medal of the German Physics Society, the Gruber Cosmology prize, the Hoyle medal, the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship, the Oort Professorship, etc. He was awarded a CBE in the 2017 Queen’s birthday honours list. Carlos is currently a member of the Royal Society Council, chair of the Royal Society Public Engagement Committee and of the ERC Advanced Investigator Grants Panel 9. He has received over £65 million in research grants, including two European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Investigator grants. He played a major role in obtaining external funding for two research buildings at Durham, one a landmark building designed by Daniel Libeskind which was opened in March 2017. He features regularly on radio and TV.
Catherine Heymans is the Astronomer Royal for Scotland, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Edinburgh and the Director of the German Centre for Cosmological Lensing at the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. She is a world-leading expert on the physics of the so-called dark universe. Catherine’s research seeks to shed light on the mysteries of dark energy and dark matter – elusive entities that together account for more than 95 per cent of the universe. Catherine regularly features as a space, physics and astronomy expert on BBC radio and television, and her first popular science book, How to Design a Universe: the Science of Real and Virtual Worlds, will be published by Bloomsbury in September 2026. All net royalties will go to the Royal Observatory Trust, supporting astronomy youth projects across Scotland.
Stephanie Flanders is Senior Executive Editor for Economics at Bloomberg and head of Bloomberg Economics. She was Chief Market Strategist for Europe at J P Morgan Asset Management in London (2013 to 2017) and BBC Economics Editor (2008 to 2013). She has also been Senior Advisor to US Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers (1997 to 2001), editorial writer for the Financial Times and an economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies and London Business School.
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