Dr. Don Lincoln Lecture: “What keeps me up at night: Unanswered Questions in Fundamental Physics”
For centuries, scientists have asked and answered big question, ones like “how old is the universe” and “do planets orbit around distant stars?” However, for all of the successes achieved by the scientific community, many enormous, unanswered, questions remain. For instance, astronomers believe that the ordinary matter that makes up you and me is only 5% of the matter and energy of the universe. The rest is a huge mystery. Physicists don’t understand why the universe isn’t made of equal amounts of matter and antimatter. That shouldn’t be. Scientists don’t know just how big the universe is. They don’t even know if it is finite or infinite, or whether it loops back in on itself.
Over the course of an hour, physicist and author Dr. Don Lincoln will share a few of the unanswered questions of modern physics – questions for which nobody knows the answer. He’ll tell you what we know, but the most tantalizing part of the talk will be the rest – what we don’t. And…don’t worry…there will be plenty of time for questions.
About
Don Lincoln is a Senior Scientist at Fermilab, America’s flagship particle physics laboratory. He has coauthored over 1,800 scientific papers on frontier physics and he is a member of the teams that discovered the top quark in 1995 and the Higgs boson in 2012.
Lincoln is also an avid popularizer of science. He has written several books for the public, most recently Einstein’s Unfinished Dream. He has written for many online venues, like CNN, Scientific American, BigThink, and many others. He hosts the Fermilab YouTube channel, and he has made several video courses available through The Great Courses company.
He is a recipient of many awards for his science communication efforts, from a range of organizations, including the European and American Physical Societies. For both his research and communication work, he has been named a Fellow of both the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Dr. Lincoln’s web page is www.drdonlincoln.com and you can follow him at www.facebook.com/Dr.Don.Lincoln.
