Physical Society Colloquium

CAP Lecture

Dark Matter and Dark Energy:
Two Great Conundrums of Our Age

Kayll Lake

Queen's University

Ten or so years ago classical general relativity was in a comfortable situation. We could rely on the uniqueness theorems for black holes, objects of growing interest in astrophysical circles, observational cosmology was the search for two numbers and higher dimensional theories were just gaining momentum. Today there is little comfort available. We know that the topology of black holes is far more complicated than expected, the uniqueness theorems for black holes don't hold and we know little about the principal source of the energy density in the current universe. In this talk I review the reactions of a classical general relativist to these changes concentrating on dark energy and dark matter.