Related papers: Basic Constituents of the Visible and Invisible Ma…
The idea that a background of invisible material pervades the whole universe is as old as the history of natural philosophy. Modern particle physics and cosmology support that idea and identify in the cosmic vacuum the ultimate source of…
Over the past century, rooted in the theory of general relativity, cosmology has developed a very successful physical model of the universe: the {\em big-bang model}. Its construction followed different stages to incorporate nuclear…
During the past two decades, cosmologists turned to particle physics in order to explore the physics of the very early Universe. The main link between the physics of the smallest and largest structures in the Universe is the idea of…
Rising to Mach, the problem of establishing the unity of the physical essence of the Universe on all space-time scales of its evolution is, apparently, one of the main problems in contemporary epistemology. The issues are primarily related…
The dark matter problem is almost a century old. Since the 1930s evidence has been growing that our cosmos is dominated by a new form of non-baryonic matter, that holds galaxies and clusters together and influences cosmic structures up to…
The discovery of a Higgs boson at the electroweak scale appears to point toward supersymmetry, as the most likely mechanism for protecting a scalar boson mass from enormous radiative corrections. The earlier discovery of neutrino masses…
Our concept of the basic constituents of matter has undergone two revolutionary changes -- from atoms to proton & neutron and then onto quarks & leptons. Indeed all these quarks and leptons have been seen by now along with the carriers of…
Today, both particle physics and cosmology are described by few parameter Standard Models, i.e. it is possible to deduce consequence of particle physics in cosmology and vice verse. The former is examined in this lecture, in light of the…
Dark matter is a fundamental constituent of the universe, which is needed to explain a wide variety of astrophysical and cosmological observations. Although the existence of dark matter was first postulated nearly a century ago and its…
The observational evidence points to the origin of our Universe from a big-bang explosion, the normal matter we observed can be well explained by the particles created in the strong and weak interacting phases of the early universe. The…
Answering well-known fundamental questions is usually regarded as the major goal of science. Discovery of other unknown and fundamental questions is, however, even more important. Recognition that "we didn't know anything" is the basic…
Revolutionary advances in both theory and technology have launched cosmology into its most exciting period of discovery yet. Unanticipated components of the universe have been identified, promising ideas for understanding the basic features…
One hundred years ago we did not know how stars generate energy, the age of the Universe was thought to be only millions of years, and our Milky Way galaxy was the only galaxy known. Today, we know that we live in an evolving and expanding…
A fascinating and deep question about nature is what one would see if one could probe space and time at smaller and smaller distances. Already the 19th-century founders of modern geometry contemplated the possibility that a piece of empty…
An introductory account is given of the understanding of the structure of the universe. At present the most plausible theory of the origin of the universe is that it formed from the explosion of an extremely hot and dense fireball several…
The classical view of mass is that it quantifies the amount of substance and is a kinematical parameter. All matter has an attribute of mass and is a conserved quantity in any interaction. With the advent of special relativity, mass became…
Newtonian mechanics posited mass as a primary quality of matter, incapable of further elucidation. We now see Newtonian mass as an emergent property. Most of the mass of standard matter, by far, arises dynamically, from back-reaction of the…
The currently accepted mathematical description of the fundamental constituents and interactions of matter is the Standard Model of particle physics. Its last missing particle, the famous Higgs boson, was observed at the Large Hadron…
The major advances in physics have been through counterintuitive breakthroughs-- ideas that seemed to go against prevailing convictions. In the twentieth century the Special and General Theory of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics have…
The past few years have seen several breakthroughs in particle astrophysics and cosmology. In several cases, new observations can only be explained with the introduction of new fundamental physics. In this talk I summarize some of these…