Going to the End of the Earth to Study the Beginning of Time

Brian Keating
Associate Professor of Physics
Director of the Ax Center for Experimental Cosmology
University of California, San Diego

 

What would it have been like to be an eyewitness to the Big Bang? Over the past decade sensitive astronomical telescopes have revealed the properties of the universe with unprecedented precision. Yet many mysteries remain. Foremost among them concerns the actual Big Bang itself. What was did the universe “look like” in the very Beginning? How can we understand the mysterious nature of Dark Matter and Dark Energy which pervade our universe? UC San Diego Professor of Physics Dr. Brian Keating, and his team of undergraduate students, graduate students and postdocs, have developed extremely powerful, cutting-edge telescopes that promise to reveal the origin and composition of the universe with exquisite precision. UC San Diego’s telescopes are currently observing from the South Pole, Antarctica and in the Chilean Atacama desert. Professor Keating will discuss these exciting experiments and the challenges of “extreme astronomy”: observing the universe from the Earth’s most remote locations.

 

The following is a link to the presentation (pdf file extension).

Presentation, Part 1
Presentation, Part 2