Friday, December 11, 2026, 7 pm, Memorial High School
Dan Hooper
Professor of Physics and the Director of the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center at the UW Madison
Over the past few decades, we have made incredible
discoveries about how our cosmos evolved over the past 13.8 billion years. But there remains a critical gap in our knowledge: we still know very little about what happened in the first seconds after the Big Bang. This talk will examine how physicists are using the Large Hadron Collider and other experiments to re-create the conditions of the Big Bang, and to address mysteries such as how our universe came to contain so much matter and so little antimatter. Could these tools enable us to discover the nature of dark matter and how it was formed in our universe’s first moments? Can we lift the veil on the era of cosmic inflation, which led to the creation of our world as we know it?
Dan Hooper is a Professor of Physics and the Director of the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center at the University
Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on the interface between particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology, and is especially interested in questions about dark matter and the early universe. He is the author of five books, including At the Edge of Time and the soon-to-be-released, The Attack of the Science Populists. He also hosts the science podcast, Why This Universe.
Location: Theater 300, Memorial High School. Directions here.
This meeting will be live-streamed via our Youtube Channel.