EVENT ANNOUNCEMENT

DATE: Nov. 12, 2003 at 4 p.m.

EVENT: 2003 Ta-You Wu Lecture in Physics

Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, Royal Society Research Professor and a Fellow of King’s College at the University of Cambridge, will give the University of Michigan Physics Department’s eleventh annual Ta-You Wu Lecture. His lecture for a general audience, "Where is Cosmology Going?" will cover the scientific advances in the field of cosmology.

BACKGROUND: In recent years, scientific cosmology has advanced dramatically. We now know the proportions of the cosmic mass-energy in atoms, dark matter and dark energy, and the key numbers describing the universe’s shape and age. This progress signals the end of an important cosmological quest. But it opens up two distinct lines of enquiry. First, we want to understand how the universe evolved from simple beginnings to its present complex state—in particular, we need new types of observations, and better modeling to understand how the first stars and galaxies formed, ending the dark age which extended from 400,000 to 200 million years after the big bang. Second, we need to address the fundamental mysteries of the ultra-early universe—to understand how the key cosmological numbers were determined and the nature of dark matter and dark energy.

PLACE: 1324 East Hall Auditorium, Central Campus. Free and open to the public.

SPONSOR: Each fall, the University of Michigan Department of Physics hosts the annual Ta-You Wu Lecture, which is one of the most prestigious lecture events in the Department. The Lectureship was endowed in 1991 through generous gifts from the University of Michigan Alumni Association in Taiwan. It is named in honor of Michigan Physics alumnus and honorary Doctor of Science, Ta-You Wu, one of the central figures of the 20th century in the Chinese and Taiwanese physics communities.

WEB LINKS: 2003 Ta-You Wu Lecture – Sir Martin Rees

Web: http://www.physics.lsa.umich.edu/nea