- Feb. 19, 2021, 7:30 pm US/Central
- Dr. Gerald Gabrielse, Northwestern University
- Tickets: $4
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The rescheduled date will now be virtual.
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Thanks for your flexibility and we apologize for the inconvenience,
Fermilab Arts and Lecture Series
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Essentially equal amounts of matter and antimatter were formed in the Big Bang according to our most fundamental description of physical reality. As the universe cooled, the antimatter and matter particles should eventually have collided and annihilated. Yet, we have a matter universe that survived. The inability of our fundamental description to describe such basic features of our universe is the great frustration of modern physics. The great triumph of modern physics is that our fundamental description makes accurate predictions of everything on earth that we can measure, some predictions confirmed to an almost unbelievable precision. How the great triumph and the great frustration can both be true is the great mystery. This lecture will give an introduction to antimatter, matter, our fundamental description of physical reality, and give examples of attempts to solve the mysteries.
Gerald Gabrielse, a member of the National Academy of Science and the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences, is a Trustees Professor at Northwestern University, and the founding director of its Center for Fundamental Physics. His vision, techniques and measurements started low energy antiproton and antihydrogen physics at the CERN laboratory, isolating a single electron, positron, proton or antiproton by itself for months at a time. He has made the most precise measurement of the property of an elementary particle, the electron’s magnet, to test the standard model’s most precise prediction. His test of whether the electron charge is spherical is one of the most sensitive tests for physics that goes beyond the standard model. For 30 years Gabrielse was the Levenson Professor of Physics at Harvard University, where he also served as the chair of its physics department. He was awarded Harvard’s prize for the exemplary teaching of undergraduates and Harvard’s prize for exceptional research, along with major prizes from the US American Physical Society, from Germany and from Italy. *Some of this work was carried out as the Levenson Professor of Physics at Harvard University.
