At the Edge of Time: Exploring the Mysteries of our Universe’s First Seconds - Dr. Dan Hooper, Fermilab, Head of Theoretical Astrophysics Group

Over the past few decades, we have made incredible discoveries about how our cosmos evolved over the past 13.8 billion years. But there remains a critical gap in our knowledge: we still know very little about what happened in the first seconds after the Big Bang. This talk will examine how physicists are using the Large Hadron Collider and other experiments to re-create the conditions of the Big Bang, and to address mysteries such as how our universe came to contain so much matter and so little antimatter. Could these tools enable us to discover the nature of dark matter and how it was formed in our universe’s first moments? Can we lift the veil on the era of cosmic inflation, which led to the creation of our world as we know it?

Dan Hooper is a Senior Scientist and the Head of the Theoretical Astrophysics Group at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, as well as a Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on the interface between particle physics and cosmology and he is especially interested in questions about dark matter and the early universe. He is the author of three books, including At the Edge of Time.

Top Image: Complete solar eclipse from as viewed from Carbondale, IL. - Aug. 2017