Frontiers of Cosmology

How’d it go? Well, here we are at the end of our class. I want to hear what you thought of it. Could you please take a minute to complete this anonymous student feedback form? Your feedback is really important to me, and it will help me continue to improve the course in the future.
Read 29.5 What Is the Universe Really Made Of? to learn about the composition of the universe, including the role of dark matter and ongoing efforts to detect weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs).
Watch this brief video in which a panel of scientists discuss the ongoing Search for WIMP Dark Matter.
Read 29.6 The Inflationary Universe to understand the concept of inflation, which proposes rapid expansion in the early universe, and its implications for cosmology.
Watch this brief video in which Alan Guth, the originator of inflation, explains The Theory of Inflation.
One of the amazing features of our universe is that the constants of nature including the cosmological constants appear to be very precisely tuned to support the development of stars, planets, and ultimately life. Watch the video The Fine Tuning of the Universe.
The leading scientific explanation for fine-tuning is a theory known as the “multiverse.” Of course, the multiverse is a familiar concept to any fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but the idea is taken quite seriously by scientists. The basic premise is that our entire universe is just one of an infinite number of universes. Watch the video Do we live in a multiverse?, in which leading cosmologists explain several variations of the core theory.
Read 29.7 The Anthropic Principle to review the ideas of fine-tuning and the multiverse.
I would like to finish this class by talking about hope. Hope is something that you don’t usually associate with science, but scientists tend to be a rather hopeful group of people. They have confidence in the ability of mankind to solve the problems we face and continue on to ever greater heights. (That is if we don’t destroy ourselves first.) There are many perplexing problems that scientists are trying to answer about our universe. What happens inside black holes? What is dark matter? What is dark energy? What, if anything, is outside of our observable universe? Despite the difficulty of answering these questions, astronomers are hopeful that they will find the crucial pieces of evidence to answer each one of them. I think this idea of “scientific hope” is beautifully illustrated by this music video entitled “A still more glorious dawn awaits” - a mash-up of clips from Carl Sagan’s famous Cosmos TV Series.