The Universe is a Strange Place
Abstract
Our understanding of ordinary matter is remarkably accurate and complete, but it is based on principles that are very strange and unfamiliar. As I'll explain, we've come to understand matter to be a Music of the Void, in a remarkably literal sense. Just as we physicists finalized that wonderful understanding, towards the end of the twentieth century, astronomers gave us back our humility, by informing us that ordinary matter -- what we, and chemists and biologists, and astronomers themselves, have been studying all these centuries constitutes only about 5% of the mass of the universe as a whole. I'll describe some of our promising attempts to rise to this challenge by improving, rather than merely complicating, our description of the world.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.physics/0511067,
title = {The Universe is a Strange Place},
author = {Frank Wilczek},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:physics/0511067},
year = {2010}
}
Comments
Public lecture delivered at Lepton-Photon 2005, Uppsala, Sweden, and in related forms on several other occasions. To be published in the Proceedings. 14 pages, 6 figures. v2: Two paragraphs that were inadvertently deleted are restored