Monthly Meeting

Over the past few decades, we have made incredible discoveries about how our cosmos evolved over the past 13.8 billion years. But there remains a critical gap in our knowledge: we still know very little about what happened in the first seconds after the Big Bang. This talk will examine how physicists are using the Large Hadron Collider and other experiments to re-create the conditions of the Big Bang, and to address mysteries such as how our universe came to contain so much matter and so little antimatter. Could these tools enable us to discover the nature of dark matter and how it was formed in our universe’s first moments? Can we lift the veil on the era of cosmic inflation, which led to the creation of our world as we know it?

The public is welcome to attend, free of charge.

Dan Hooper is Head of Theoretical Astrophysics at Fermilab and a Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on the interface between particle physics and cosmology, and especially on the topic of dark matter. He is the author of several books, including At the Edge of Time: Exploring the Mysteries of Our Universe’s First Seconds. He is also a co-host of the podcast Why This Universe.

This event is open to the public and free of charge.