Gerry Gilmore
Cambridge University,United Kindgom

Tejinder Virdee
European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN),Switzerland

Saturday 19 July | 08:30 – 10:00

Key-note Lecture: The Universe and Reality

Cosmologists can now say with some confidence that our Universe consists of 5 percent of matter like that of which we are made, 25 percent some other, still unknown, form of transparent matter, and 70 percent of a still mysterious form of dark energy, which is controlling the fate of the Universe. Our importance in this list is the natural extension of the “Copernican principle”, which notes that any explanation for an observation or event which requires a special role for Man is inevitably wrong. Astrophysics has extended this Copernican concept so far that we know that almost everything that we see in the Universe, and the very type of matter of which we are made, is an almost insignificant perturbation on a deeper and very different reality. It may be that the reality we have discovered on the largest scales is the same as that now being approached from the smallest scales, in particle physics. Or it may not. Yet we are able to describe much of the past history of the Universe, from its origin as an imperfect fluctuation in nothing, to the present when gravity has lost control of the fate of the Universe, and to consider possible far futures.

Results from the forthcoming experiments on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) accelerator at CERN have the potential to alter our perception of how Nature operates. These experiments, due to start collecting data in 2008, will be the most important ones in elementary particle physics for the foreseeable future. The aim is to tackle some of the most fundamental questions about the origin, evolution and composition of our universe. Potential discoveries include new forms of matter, new forces of nature, new dimensions of space and time. Particular questions to be addressed include: what is the origin of mass, what constitutes dark matter, why is the universe composed of matter, not antimatter, and more.
For these experiments, protons will be collided at unprecedented high energies to recreate and study states of matter believed to have been present a fraction of a nanosecond after the Big Bang.