Ken Levy, Program Chair

Many thanks to Dr. Paul Steinhardt for our February lecture, “Inflationary Cosmology on Trial”.

March heralds the beginning of spring with another not to miss lecture by Dr. Mark Trodden, “Modern Cosmology and the Building Blocks of the Universe”.

No two ways about it – the universe is really, really big! If we want to understand it, we need to know about nature on very large scales. On the other hand, atoms and their constituents are extremely small! To understand them requires us to know about nature on very small scales.

The challenge of modern cosmology is to use these seemingly different aspects of physics to explain how a young, hot, small universe became the old, cold, huge universe we see today–to understand the physics of the Big Bang.

In this presentation, Dr. Trodden will tour the major ideas of 20th century cosmology and try to give a picture of how cosmologists are trying to address these questions that require the physics of the large and the physics of the small to work together.

Mark Trodden is the Fay R. and Eugene L. Langberg Professor of Physics, and co-Director of the Center for Particle Cosmology at the University of Pennsylvania. Trodden has worked broadly in both cosmology and particle physics. The majority of his work is firmly on the particle physics-cosmology border, and includes the development of the modified gravity approach to cosmic acceleration, approaches to dark energy and dark matter, extra dimensional models of particle physics and cosmology, and the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the universe.

Dr. Trodden holds an MA in Mathematics and a Certificate of Advanced Study in Mathematics from Cambridge University. He also holds a M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in Physics from Brown University. He previously held the Alumni Professorship at Syracuse University, and has held visiting positions at Cornell University, the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, and as a Sir Thomas Lyle Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Dr. Trodden is a Kavli Frontiers Fellow, was awarded the Science and Technology Outreach Award of the Technology Alliance of Central New York, is a Cottrell Scholar of Research Corporation, and has chaired the National Academy of Sciences Kavli Frontiers of Science Symposium and the Working Group on Cosmological Connections of the American Linear Collider Physics Group. He sits on the editorial boards of Physics Letters B, the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, the New Journal of Physics, and the Springer Multiversal Journeys Series.