Our understanding of the cosmos has come a long way since the early Mesopotamians described a flat, circular Earth embedded in a cosmic ocean. Now, we build massive telescopes and use highly sensitive instruments to measure our universe. Still, many questions remain about what the universe is made of and how it has evolved over the past 13.8 billion years. Join us for this fall’s Arthur H Compton Lecture Series, “Nuts and Bolts Cosmology,” to learn more about the history of observational cosmology, how telescopes work, and the big questions scientists hope to answer experimentally in the future.

Lecturer Amy Lowitz is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Chicago. She conducts research with KICP and the Argonne National Laboratory, where she works on instrumentation for the South Pole Telescope.

Nuts and Bolts Cosmology

• 09/29/2018 – The Small Universe: The first 380,000 years
• 10/06/2018 – Where Did We Come From: A history of cosmology from the ground
• 10/13/2018 – Gazing Long into the Abyss: A history of light detection
• 10/20/2018 – Seeing the Light: How ‘digital pixels’ for telescopes work
• 10/27/2018 – Catching the Light: How telescope cameras work
• 11/03/2018 – The Invisible Universe: Looking at dark matter
• 11/10/2018 – Cosmology at the End of the Earth: Why and how we work at the South Pole
• 11/17/2018 – Are we there yet?: Where we’re going and how we might get there

Logistics

Dates: Eight Saturdays, 9/29/18 to 11/17/18

Time: 11:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m.

Location: Kersten Physics Teaching Center, 5720 South Ellis Avenue, Room 106. Enter through the door at the southeast corner.

Cost: free