ALL Course: Understanding Our Strange Universe

“Understanding” Our Strange Universe

With Rich Wagner

Date: Friday, April 26 (please note: this course has been rescheduled from its original date of April 30)

Time: 10:30am–noon

Location: Van Lennep Auditorium, CBMM

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

Course Description:

Our intuition about what makes sense in the natural world was developed over the course of our evolution to enable us to survive in the environments here on earth. But those environments are ‘plain vanilla’ compared to the more extreme conditions in almost all of the rest of the universe. Our intuition doesn’t help us much to understand the objects and behaviors of the universe that science has revealed over the past few hundred years. Even the physicists and cosmologists who work it all out have often not been immune from the sense that what we know just can’t be the way the world works. In this session, I will describe some of the bizarre objects and strange-seeming behaviors that the universe throws at us and I will try to explain both why they are difficult to understand and why they actually make sense. It is admittedly a tall order but it will be fun to try!

Members $10.50 | Non-Members $15

About the Instructors:

Rich Wagner is a physicist whose doctoral work in elementary particle physics led to research in astrophysics, fusion, nuclear weapons, and other national security aspects of science and technology. He has pursued interests in cosmology and the sciences of consciousness for many years.