Events

Event Information:

• Tue

  13

  Sep

  2016

  Colloquium

  4:00 pmLewis Hall 101

  Michael S Turner
  Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
  University of Chicago

  The Big Picture:  What We Know About How the Universe Began and What We Are Trying to Find Out

  Today the Universe is made out of dark matter, dark energy and a small amount of ordinary matter (the atoms we are made of).  We can trace the history of the Universe back to when it was a microsecond and was a formless quark soup.  We now have good evidence for an early burst of tremendous expansion (inflation) that stretched sub-atomic quantum fluctuations to astrophysical size and created the seeds for galaxies.  But there is much to figure out, including what dark matter is made of, what the nature of the mysterious dark energy is, and when inflation took place.