Half a century ago, scientists at the University of Chicago's Enrico Fermi Institute helped invent a new way to study the universe: by treating the Big Bang itself as a laboratory to explore nature at energy scales unreachable on earth.
This fall, nine of the researchers who carry that legacy forward will share what those 50 years have uncovered—from the invisible matter holding galaxies together to the gravitational ripples of colliding black holes.
The series of free public talks by UChicago scientists, “The Compton Lectures: 50 Years of Discovery,” run every Saturday from Oct. 3 through Dec. 5 at 11 a.m. in the Kersten Physics Teaching Center.
"Fifty years ago, cosmology was a fringe area of science, with little data and little theoretical effort," wrote Rocky Kolb, a UChicago cosmologist.
Kolb’s lecture, "Enrico Fermi Institute and the Chicago School of Particle Cosmology," will open the series on Oct. 3 by describing how the institute, in collaboration with Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, led the world in the development of the new field of particle cosmology.
The following week, astrophysicist John Carlstrom will take audiences to the South Pole. His Oct. 10 talk, "Exploring the Big Bang from the South Pole," discusses the study of the Cosmic Microwave Background—the faint afterglow of the Big Bang—using specialized telescopes deployed at the South Pole and what that has taught us about the origin and evolution of our universe.
The series then turns to what the solar system's rocky bodies can tell us about the cosmos. Geophysical scientist Andy Davis will explain on Oct. 17 how Enrico Fermi Institute researchers discovered that meteorites carry grains of actual stardust—microscopic bits of material from dying stars and supernovae and what that has taught us about the origins and formation of our solar system.
On Oct. 24, particle physicist Marcela Carena traces the path from UChicago professor Yoichiro Nambu's insight about the quantum vacuum to the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN. Her talk, “Broken Symmetries and the Origins of Mass and Matter,” will discuss the ongoing mystery of why the universe contains matter rather than nothing.
Physicist Jeff Harvey continues the theoretical thread on Oct. 31 with a half-century retrospective on string theory at the Enrico Fermi Institute, followed on Nov. 7 by Luca Grandi's survey of the decades-long hunt for dark matter. Grandi will describe how ultra-sensitive detectors have steadily narrowed the hiding places for the invisible substance that makes up 85% of all matter in the universe—and why the search remains one of the most exciting pursuits in physics.
Daniel Holz will bring audiences up to the present on Nov. 14 with "A Decade of Gravitational-Wave Science." Since the first detection of a gravitational-wave event in 2015, scientists have catalogued hundreds of collisions between black holes and neutron stars. Holz will highlight what that growing census has revealed about how the universe forges and merges these extreme objects.
Astrophysicist Angela Olinto, professor emeritus at UChicago and current provost of Columbia University, will describe on Nov. 21 how NASA science balloons equipped with ultra-fast cameras are catching the most energetic subatomic particles ever observed—cosmic rays and neutrinos arriving from the most violent corners of the cosmos. She will also preview a planned 2028 balloon flight expected to push those observations further.
The series closes on Dec. 5 with Young-Kee Kim tracing Chicago's contributions to precision particle physics over five decades, from landmark discoveries to stringent tests of the Standard Model of Physics, and pointing toward the open questions that may reveal what lies beyond it.
The Compton Lecture Series has been a fixture of UChicago public science outreach since 1976, when it was established by Enrico Fermi Institute Director John Simpson. The lectures are named for Arthur Holly Compton, UChicago Professor of Physics who shared the Nobel prize in Physics in 1927 for establishing that light doesn’t just behave like a wave; it also behaves like a particle with momentum.
All talks are held at the Kersten Physics Teaching Center, 5720 S. Ellis Ave., Room 106, and will also be broadcast online. More information can be found on the event website.
