11:00 am–12:00 pm MCP 201
Seth Koren (UChicago) "Particles, the Cosmos, and You: An Origin Story from the Edges of Space and Time"
Over the past century our scientific understanding of the universe has advanced dramatically. Age-old questions like "What are we made of?" and "Where did we come from?" now have well-understood, empirical answers. In this wide-ranging lecture series, Dr. Koren will tour the fundamental particle physics underlying these big questions.
We will zoom in from you as a collection of trillions of cells down to your constituent quarks and Higgs bosons a billion times smaller than the atom. We will discuss the early universe history of this matter back to mere minutes after the Big Bang itself, as we understand the formation of the protons in your body and the galaxy in which we reside. And we will see throughout that this scientific understanding clarifies how we should think about ourselves and our place in the universe.
