HR: 13:40h
AN: U43B-01 INVITED     [Abstracts]
TI: The Origin, Evolution, and Composition of the Universe
AU: * Primack, J
EM: joel@scipp.ucsc.edu
AF: Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA 95064 United States
AB: Modern cosmology -- the study of the universe as a whole, its origin, evolution, and structure -- is undergoing a scientific revolution. New ground- and space-based telescopes can now observe every bright galaxy in the universe, and see back in time to the cosmic dark ages before galaxies formed. We can read the history of the early universe in the ripples of heat radiation still arriving from the Big Bang. We now know that everything that we can see makes up only about half a percent of what is there, and that most of the universe is made of invisible stuff called "dark matter" and "dark energy." The Cold Dark Matter theory based on this appears to be able to account for all the main features of the observable universe, including the heat radiation and the large scale distribution of galaxies. There are possible problems, of course -- for example, some details of the structure of galaxies may not agree with theory -- and we still do not know what happened before the Big Bang. Nevertheless, modern cosmology is developing humanity's first story of the origin and nature of the universe that might actually be true, meaning that it will still be true in the distant future, although new knowledge will no doubt expand beyond our current understanding.
DE: 2199 General or miscellaneous
SC: Union [U]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting