Friday, April 3rd, 2009

Big Questions in Cosmology

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Record of a collision at Fermilab's Tevatron, as seen by the DZero experiment. DZero Team, Fermilab.

In the beginning, there was a Big Bang. After that, well, it gets a little murky. This hour, we're taking you back to the origins of the universe--to the quarks, leptons, bosons and other particles that make up us, and everything around us. We've gathered some of the best minds in cosmology and particle physics to tell us to find out what scientists know about the building blocks of the universe, and what they still need to know. What missing parts of quantum theory can the Large Hadron Collider provide? And where does string theory fit in? In this hour, we'll get an update on the very small--particle physics--and the very large--cosmology--and find out how these two fields of study fit together. Plus, why dark matter doesn't matter here on Earth. We're broadcasting from Tempe, Arizona this week, as part of ASU's Origins Symposium. See a web stream of the Origins Symposium here.

Guests

Steven Weinberg
Professor of Physics and Astronomy
The University of Texas at Austin
Nobel Prize, 1979, Physics
Austin, Texas

Michael Turner
Professor, Departments of Astronomy and Astrophysics and Physics
Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
University of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois

Brian Greene
Professor Mathematics and Physics
Columbia University
New York, New York

Lawrence Krauss
Foundation Professor, School of Earth and Space Exploration and Physics Department
Inaugural Director, Origins Initiative
Arizona State University
Tempe, Arizona

Related Books

Related Links

Segment produced by:Annette Heist

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Image: of the first full-energy collisions between gold ions at Brookhaven Lab's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, as captured by the Solenoidal Tracker At RHIC (STAR) detector.
RHIC team, Brookhaven National Laboratory

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