Cosmologyand

The Creation of the Universe

In 1965 two radio astronomers working for Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, wereworking on Project Echo, a NASA project to bounce microwaves off of a metalized balloon on the edge of space. As they tunedtheir massive horn antenna they noticed a faint background hiss for which they had no explanation. Further confounding them,no matter where they pointed their antenna the hiss persisted. Simultaneously two Princeton physicists, Robert Dicke and PJEPeebles, realized that in order for the early universe to “brew” the elements required for the world around us, it must have beena very hot place indeed! Penzias and Wilson, upon learning of the work of Dicke and Peebles, realized that the hiss was infact the faint echo of the creation of the universe; the radiation left over from a cataclysmic event, cooled through the passageof space and permeating everything around them! Penzias and Wilson would share the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics for theirdiscovery, but this, in truth, was only the very beginning...

Cosmogony is the study of the birthing process of the universe while cosmology is the branch of physics dealing with theorigin, structure, and evolution of the universe, from it’s birth, to the present, to the distant future. While history has beenlittered with the remains of former cosmological models, scientific consensus today points to an event we colloquially refer toas “The Big Bang”. In fact, it is mostly beyond a reasonable doubt that this theory is quite correct. How big then was thisbang? How bang like was it? Is it going to happen again?

In this meeting of the USF Society of Physics Students we will take the audience on a journey to the very beginnings oftheir existence; a time and place that never was. A time when the forces of nature were unified, matter did not exist, and thewhole of space inflated; increasing its size by a factor of 1050 in the space of 10−32 seconds! The bizarre nature of the earlyuniverse only begins here as much of the story takes place within the very first second of the existence of space and time. Thiswould be followed by a period known as the primordial fireball; a blazing hot soup of the fundamental particles of nature at suchhigh temperatures it would take 380,000 years to cool to the point of creating the first atoms, a time known as recombination.From here we will build the earliest stars and galaxies, explore the large scale structure of the universe, and investigate whyevery galaxy in the universe is moving away from us at titanic speeds.

(a) A schematic of the evolution of the universe. (b) A small vista of the spiderweb structure of galaxies inthe universe as simulated by supercomputers.

The USF Physics Department and the Society of Physics Students welcomes all members of the university and communityto come on Thursday, October 27th at 8 PM to the physics auditorium (ISA 1061) and learn about these exciting ideas and toengage in a discussion about the current state of the universe and where it is ultimately heading.