The Frontiers of Fundamental Physics

Abstract

The speaker reviews the present state of knowledge in elementary particle physics and the questions that we are currently addressing. He discusses the experimental revolutions that might occur at the Large Hadron Collider now running at CERN. The speaker will also review the state of string theory. The necessity to go beyond the standard model of particle physics and to understand quantum gravity has led to this ambitious attempt to unify all the forces of nature and all forms of matter as different vibrations of a string-like object. But string theory is still in a pre-revolutionary stage. Although remarkable progress has been achieved in the last decade we still lack a fundamental understanding of the theory. Many string theorists suspect that a profound conceptual change in our concept of space and time will be required for the final formulation of string theory.

About the Speaker

Prof. David Gross won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004 for the discovery of asymptotic freedom, which focuses on understanding the strong interactions that bind quarks and nuclear matter to string theory. After receiving his PhD from UC Berkeley in 1966, he was a Junior Fellow at Harvard University and was affiliated with Princeton University for 27 years. He joined UC Santa Barbara in 1996 and is now the director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics. A member of the US National Academy of Sciences, he is the recipient of the J. J. Sakurai Prize of the American Physical Society in 1986, and the Dirac Medal in 1988. In 2004, he was selected to receive France’s highest scientific honor, the Grande Médaille D’or, for his contributions to the understanding of fundamental physical reality.