Striving to understand the weird stuff
It is the second visit by American astrophysicist Adam Riess, who received the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for uncovering evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
He has previously had e-mail exchanges with Chinese scientists.
“These meetings are great for scientific interaction which may not all be clear on paper,” he told Shanghai Daily.
He added that in future spaceships are “very natural places for international collaborations” as all components of a spaceship may well be built by different nations.
Much of his research is on the struggle to understand the unknown parts of the universe.
“Ninety-five percent of the universe is unknown, filled with dark matter and dark energy,” Riess explained. “And our job is to understand the weird stuff of that 95 percent.”
The weird stuff, such as black holes, are only known through gravitation, which makes his research to understand dark energy and dark matter one of the two hottest areas in astrophysics. The other is to search for planets and life on those far-off planets.