The lecture has come and gone by now. Here are the slides in html; they're also available in the form of a 3MB pdf file.


Summary: The twentieth century witnessed breathtaking discoveries about the nature of the cosmos. We learned that the universe is over ten billion years old and expanding, and that the Standard Model of particle physics provides a detailed understanding of the behavior of ordinary matter.

But we now know that ordinary matter comprises only five percent of the stuff in the universe. Most of the universe is mysterious and invisible, in the form of dark matter (twenty-five percent) and dark energy (seventy percent). The challenge for the twenty-first century will be to develop a true understanding of what these discoveries mean. What is the dark matter and dark energy that makes up most of the universe? How did the universe begin? How does it work? To answer these questions, physicists will delve even deeper into the realms of high-energy particles, large-scale structure, and the mystery of gravity.


The lecture is part of the 2005 Aspen Winter Conference, The Highest Energy Physics, at the Aspen Center for Physics.

Sean Carroll is an assistant professor in the Physics Department and Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago, and head of the Theory Research Component of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics. He received his Ph.D. in astrophysics from Harvard in 1993, and did postdoctoral work at MIT and at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara. While at MIT he won the Graduate Student Council Teaching Award for his course on General Relativity. The lecture notes from this course have been expanded into the textbook Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity. Since become a faculty member at Chicago in 1999, he has been awarded fellowships from the Sloan and Packard foundations, as well as the Malmstrom Lectureship at Hamline University and the Resnick Lectureship at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He is active in education and outreach, giving public lectures and appearing on radio and television. His current research interests include models of dark energy in the universe, tests of alternatives to Einstein's general relativity, the effects of extra dimensions on spacetime dynamics, and the physics of inflationary cosmology.

For talk information, contact Sean Carroll at carroll@theory.uchicago.edu.