Bethe lecturer to discuss big bang, universe evolution

Winstein

Bruce Winstein, the Samuel K. Allison Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, will discuss radiation left over from the big bang and studies of anti-matter when he delivers three Hans A. Bethe lectures at Cornell, April 12, 14 and 19.

All three talks will be in Schwartz Auditorium of Rockefeller Hall, on campus, and will be open to the public without charge.

Winstein will present his first physics colloquium, "The Allure of the Neutral Kaons," on April 12 at 4:30 p.m. He will review what has been learned about anti-matter and its place in the universe.

The talk on Wednesday, April 14, at 7:30 p.m. will be on the topic "Startling Revelations About Our Universe," and it will be for a more general audience. Winstein will describe the current understanding of how the universe began, what it is made of, how large it is, how it is currently evolving and how the great open questions that remain are being addressed.

A second physics colloquium, "Searching for Patterns in the Polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation," will be delivered on Monday, April 19, at 4:30 p.m. In this talk, Winstein will describe the difficulties and challenges of measuring the polarization of the background radiation, and how such measurements can potentially reveal properties of the universe at its earliest possible moments.

Winstein earned his undergraduate degree from the University of California-Los Angeles and his Ph.D. in physics from the California Institute of Technology. In 1972 he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago.

Until 1999, when a Guggenheim fellowship at Princeton allowed him to become a cosmologist, his research had focused on high-energy particle physics. He currently is director of the National Science Foundation-funded Center for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Bethe Lectures, established by Cornell's Department of Physics and College of Arts and Sciences, honors Hans A. Bethe, Cornell professor emeritus of physics, whose description of the nuclear processes powering the sun won him the Nobel Prize in physics in 1967. The lectures have been given annually since 1977.