Event

Profs and Pints Philadelphia presents: “Finding the Cosmic Puzzle’s Missing Pieces,” a look at how the fields of astronomy and subatomic physics are working in tandem to shed light on the darkest parts of the universe, with Mark Trodden, professor of physics, co-director of the Center for Particle Cosmology, and associate dean for the natural sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.

For most of the last century, physicists pushed our understanding of the microscopic world down to ever-smaller sizes, splitting the atom to reveal its inner workings and enable astonishing new discoveries, including, most recently, the Higgs particle.

At the same time, other scientists—astronomers—have continued to look to the skies for “the big picture” of the universe, peering far beyond our galaxy and looking back to the beginning of time. They have discovered that the universe contains the mysterious entities of dark matter and dark energy, and that the Big Bang may have arisen through cosmic inflation, a dramatic expansion of space about which we’ve gained crucial new knowledge just in recent years.

Learn how modern cosmology is weaving together these seemingly distinct strands of knowledge, turning our telescopes into microscopes and allowing us to read the hitherto unknown dark side of the universe, in a fascinating talk being given at the Black Squirrel Club in Philadelphia’s Fishtown.

The speaker, theoretical physicist Mark Trodden, conducts research that has contributed to a broad range of topics in particle physics, gravity and cosmology. He focuses on some of the most pressing problems in fundamental physics found at the interfaces between these fields. His talk promises to be mind-blowing, and it will make you see the universe in entirely new ways. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Guests are welcome to arrive any time after 5:30. Talk starts at 6:30.)

Image: From a 2012 dark matter map by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey

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