Annual Compton lectures will begin Sept. 30

Learn why nature chose to fill the universe with matter and virtually no antimatter in a series of free, public lectures at the University beginning Saturday, Sept. 30.

The series of 10 lectures, titled “History of Antimatter,” will begin at 11 a.m. each Saturday through Dec. 9, in Room 106 of the Kersten Physics Teaching Center, 5720 S. Ellis Ave. There will be no lecture Nov. 25, the Saturday after Thanksgiving.

Richard Kessler, Senior Research Associate at the Enrico Fermi Institute, will deliver the lectures. He will introduce the concepts of antimatter, explain how it has been observed and discuss accelerator-based experiments that provide insight into the preponderance of matter in our universe.

The talks are the 52nd series of Arthur Holly Compton Lectures, sponsored each fall and spring by the Enrico Fermi Institute. Compton was a University physicist and a Nobel laureate, best known for demonstrating that light has the characteristics of both a wave and a particle. He also organized the effort to produce plutonium for the atomic bomb and directed the Metallurgical Laboratory at Chicago, where Fermi and his colleagues produced the first controlled nuclear chain reaction in 1942.

The lectures are intended to make science accessible to a general audience and to convey the excitement of new discoveries in the physical sciences. Previous topics have ranged from the smallest fundamental particles to the history of the universe. All of the lectures are free and open to the public.

For more information, call (773) 702-7823.