How did the all the stars and galaxies end up where we see them today? The very first instance of the Universe's existence holds the answer.

We may be a little closer to a direct detection of dark energy thanks to a new result that came about, in a sense, by accident.

What do we know about our Universe? And could there be more than one?

Some of the things I overheard at Stephen Hawking's 70th birthday conference did make me wonder whether I hadn't got the wrong building and stumbled in on a sci-fi convention. "The state of the multiverse". "The Universe is simple but strange". "The future for intelligent life is potentially infinite". And — excuse me — "the Big Bang was just the decay of our parent vacuum"?!

This is the first part of the lecture given by Astronomer Royal Martin Rees at Stephen Hawking's birthday symposium.

This is the second part of the lecture given by Astronomer Royal Martin Rees at Stephen Hawking's birthday symposium.

This year's Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for a discovery that proved Einstein wrong and right at the same time.