Hello Folks,

UC Irvine is holding a fascinating lecture you might want to know about. It’s called “View from the Center of the Universe: Understanding Man’s Place in the Cosmos.” This lecture is scheduled for May 10, 2006, at 8:00 p.m. in the Engineering Lecture Hall, Room 100 (ELH ), at the University of California, Irvine.

The lecture is being hosted by the Center for Cosmology and the Department of Physics and Astronomy, and it is free and open to the public. Parking is $7. Please park in the new Engineering Parking Structure on Anteater Drive (click here for parking information).

More Information

Cosmology is going through a scientific revolution that is creating humanity’s first picture of the universe that might actually be true. This lecture explains and visualizes the evolution of the Universe, the fact that the universe is made mostly of dark matter and dark energy with visible matter making up only about half a percent of the total, and the remarkable fact that humans – and indeed intelligent life anywhere in the universe – must have a size that is in the middle of all possible size scales.

Joel Primack, Professor of Physics at UCSC, is one of the world’s leading cosmologists and an originator and developer of the theory of evolution of the Universe. He and his team use some of the world’s biggest supercomputers to simulate the evolution of the Universe, and they compare the results with observational data.

Nancy Abrams is a lawyer, writer, and former Fulbright scholar, with a long-term interest in the history, philosophy, and politics of science. While working on the staff of the U.S. Congress, she co-created a novel method by which government agencies can make wise policy decisions in cases involving scientific uncertainty.