Benjamin Dean Lecture: The State of the Universe

Since the discovery of galaxies and of cosmic expansion nearly a century ago, scientists have made estimable progress in establishing the age, evolution, and composition of the universe.   But in doing so they have found that almost all of the observable universe is made of unknown materials.  "Dark energy," evidently a property of the vacuum, constitutes 68 percent of the matter/energy in the universe.  "Dark matter," which interacts gravitationally with normal matter but is otherwise invisible, accounts for another 27 percent.  Everything humans have previously observed-all the stars, planets, and nebulae-weighs in at less than 5 percent.  And that's just the observable universe.  There's lots more, perhaps an infinite amount, beyond. This talk surveys what is currently known about the universe, then presents a new way of looking at nature that goes beyond classical science to offer a glimpse of how the cosmos may be investigated in the near future.

Speaker: Timothy Ferris, UC Berkeley