College of Arts & Sciences
Department of Physics & Astronomy
Public Lecture
Memorial Hall
7:00 PM, Thursday, November 3, 2005
Dr. Frank Wilczek
Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Nobel Laureate in Physics 2004
The Universe is a Strange Place
Over the course of the twentieth century we have constructed a very
successful fundamental theory of the behavior of matter. Viewed from this
perspective, the world looks very different from our everyday reality. It
is a very strange place, and a beautiful one -- in particular, we've come to
understand that the building blocks of matter appear as notes in a Music of
the Void. I'll describe this using a combination of facts, pictures, and
jokes. Finally I'll discuss some recent discoveries indicating that the
world is even stranger than we've understood so far, and how we're rising to
the challenge.