SPEAKER:   Patricia Burchat
                 Chair, Department of Physics, Stanford University

TIME:         General Meeting 7:30 pm,  speaker at 8:00pm
WHERE:     The CSM Planetarium   Free and open to the public

TOPIC:      The Dark Side of the Universe

Presentation Abstract:

A 21st Century View of the Universe: Dark Matter and Dark Energy  

A scientific revolution in our understanding of the universe is under way. In the last decade or so, cosmology has become an observational science that has led to two mysterious observations: about a quarter of the universe is "dark matter," which gravitationally attracts but is otherwise invisible, and about two-thirds is "dark energy," which causes space itself to expand at an ever-increasing rate. That means only a small fraction of the energy in the universe is due to matter that we understand! In this presentation, we will explore the evidence for dark matter and dark energy, and the experiments being developed to investigate their fundamental nature.

Speaker Biography:

Patricia Burchat is Chair of the Physics Department at Stanford University. She studies differences in the time evolution of matter and antimatter created at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), and the gravitational bending of light by massive clusters of galaxies in the universe. She has held several leadership positions in the 550-person international BABAR Collaboration at SLAC. She was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005. She was appointed as a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education in 2004, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2001. In 2007, Prof. Burchat was awarded the Walter J. Gores Award for excellence in teaching.