Fermilab series continues with lecture on physics
Submitted by Fermilab
Fermilab’s Summer of Lectures continues with “Particles, Fields and Future of Physics” by Sean Carroll of Caltech at 7 p.m. Wednesday, June 12, in Ramsey Auditorium at Wilson Hall. Tickets are $7.
Visitors may enter Fermilab through the Pine Street entrance in Batavia, or the Batavia Road entrance in Warrenville. For tickets, call (630) 840-ARTS or visit www.fnal.gov/culture/NewArts/index.shtml.
This lecture is presented in conjunction with the Fermilab Users annual meeting and the worldwide International Linear Collider event, “From Design to Reality.”
With the recent discovery of the Higgs boson, particle physicists have completed the Standard Model, a towering accomplishment. But we know that the Standard Model can’t be the whole story — there must be other particles still waiting to be discovered.
New particles can hide from us in two ways: they cause a lot of energy to produce, or they interact very rarely with ordinary matter.
Physicists are pushing forward on both frontiers in order to construct a more complete picture of reality. Future experiments will discover new particles and interactions that will help explain dark matter, dark energy, and the underlying symmetries of the natural world.
Carroll is a theoretical physicist at Caltech in Pasadena, Calif. He does research on theoretical aspects of cosmology, field theory, and gravitation. He wants to learn about fundamental physics by studying the structure and evolution of the universe.
These days he is especially interested in inflation, the arrow of time, and what happened at or before the Big Bang. He has also done work on dark matter and dark energy, modified gravity, topological defects, extra dimensions, and violations of fundamental symmetries.
Carroll has written a book on cosmology and the arrow of time, “From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time.” He also wrote a graduate textbook, “Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity,” and recorded lectures for the Teaching Company on “Dark Matter and Dark Energy” and the “Mysteries of Time.”
His latest book, which came out in November 2012, is “The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World.” It’s about the Large Hadron Collider, the search for the Higgs boson, and the people who made it happen. Carroll is also at work on a special for PBS’s “NOVA” on the same topic, scheduled to air in 2013.