Spring Compton Lectures to highlight evolving universe

The breakthroughs that led to the hot big bang model of the universe and highlights of current cosmological research will be covered in a series of free, public lectures at the University of Chicago beginning Saturday, April. 3. The series of 10 lectures, titled “Exploring the Mysteries of Our Evolving Universe: Observational Tests of Big Bang Cosmology,” will begin Saturday mornings at 11 a.m. through June 12 in Room 115 of the Kersten Physics Teaching Center, 5720 S. Ellis Ave. There will be no lecture on May 29, the Saturday before Memorial Day. Joseph Mohr, Chandra Fellow in the Chicago Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics, will deliver the lectures. Mohr earned his bachelor’s degree in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his master’s and doctoral degrees in astronomy from Harvard University. Formerly a research fellow in physics and astronomy at the University of Michigan, he was appointed to a Chandra Fellowship in 1998.

The first five lectures will cover the foundations of the big bang model. These include discoveries of the universe’s expansion, the existence of the cosmic microwave background and the resulting theoretical framework. The last five lectures will describe ongoing efforts to map the universe, to detail the nature of “dark” or unseen matter, and to understand how the complex structures in the nearby universe, such as stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies and larger-scale structures, arose from an astonishingly uniform early universe.

The talks are the 49th series of Arthur Holly Compton Lectures, sponsored each fall and spring by the Enrico Fermi Institute. Compton was a Chicago physicist and Nobel laureate, best known for demonstrating that light has the characteristics of both a wave and a particle. He also organized the effort to produce plutonium for the atomic bomb and directed the Metallurgical Laboratory at Chicago where Fermi and colleagues produced the first controlled nuclear chain reaction in 1942.

The lectures are intended to make science accessible to a general audience and to convey the excitement of new discoveries in the physical sciences. Previous topics have ranged from the smallest fundamental particles to the history of the universe. All of the lectures are free and open to the public. For more information, call (773) 702-7823.

I. Foundations of the hot big bang model.

• April 3 Observing the expansion of the universe.
• April 10 The cosmic microwave background.
• April 17 Creation of the elements in the early universe.
• April 24 The dark night sky, causality and geometry.
• May 1 A timeline for the universe.

II. Current hot topics in observational cosmology.

• May 8 Mapping the large scale structures in the nearby universe.
• May 15 Observing the seeds of structure formation in the cosmic microwave background.
• May 22 Detecting dark matter with the Chandra X-ray satellite.
• June 5 Measuring the size and geometry of the universe.
• June 12 Using shadows in the cosmic microwave background to map structures at the edge of the universe.