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Nancy
Ellen
Abrams
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Joel
Primack
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Our Cosmically Pivotal Moment
The world is in the midst of a cosmological revolution on the same scale of cultural significance as the Copernican revolution. Modern scientific cosmology now explains far more than just the Big Bang. It tells us what strange ingredients the universe is made of, how the universe evolved, how it operates on all size scales, including our own, and where it is going. The new theories provide an underpinning for a globally shared picture of reality, which could improve prospects for global cooperation. Most educated people today still picture the universe as shapeless, possibly infinite, mostly empty space – much as Isaac Newton pictured it – while at the same time we all happily exploit technologies based on relativity, quantum mechanics, and other new science completely inconsistent with that 17th century overview of the universe. The major threats to human survival today – world environmental degradation, extinction of species, climate destabilization, nuclear war, terrorists with weapons of mass destruction – all result in large part from unrestrained use of modern technologies without an accurate cosmic context in which they make sense and from which we can get a broad perspective on what we’re really doing with them. Our home planet Earth is integrated into the cosmos, but our current thinking about it is not, and therein lies the root of major problems. People need a way to wrap their minds around a Big Picture for our time. Unlike earlier cultures, we in the West have no shared understanding of our common origins. Without a believable story that gives us a framework in which to understand the high-tech, fast-paced, and dangerous world we’re actually living in, there is no way to conceptualize the big picture, thus no way to see it. Without a big picture, we are very small people. Scientific cosmology does not directly tell anybody anything about how we humans should behave. It just tells us how the universe works. The choice today is whether to see scientific cosmology as something intellectually interesting but not personally relevant, or to take it seriously as the most accurate map of reality we have. These two alternatives have tremendously different implications for how people feel and act. A meaningful science-based cosmology could turn out to be the practical knowledge that lets us make sense for the first time of both the threats and the opportunities of our time. President Obama in his victory speech on election night challenged America to think 100 years into the future. But this cannot be done without a Big Picture. Our talk makes the connection between scientific cosmology and our human future.
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Nancy Ellen Abrams is the co-author (with cosmologist Joel Primack) of The View from the Center of the Universe: Discovering Our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos (Riverhead/Penguin 2006), and the author of many articles that have appeared in journals such as The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Environment, California Lawyer, and Science and Global Security. She has a B.A. in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Chicago, a law degree from the University of Michigan, and a diploma in international law from the Escuela Libre de Derecho in Mexico City. She has a long-term interest in the role of science in shaping a new politics and has worked in this area for a European environmental think tank in Rome, the Ford Foundation, and the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress, where she co-invented (with Prof. R. Stephen Berry of the University of Chicago) a novel procedure called "Scientific Mediation," which permits government agencies to make intelligent policy decisions in areas where the underlying science is crucial yet uncertain and controversial. With Joel R. Primack she has co-authored numerous articles on science policy, space policy, and the possible cultural implications of modern cosmology. Recent ones are posted on their joint website, http://physics.ucsc.edu/cosmo/primackabrams.html.
"Cosmology and Culture," the course she and Primack developed and teach at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has received awards from both the Templeton Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. Nancy is also a topical singer/songwriter who has performed at conferences, concerts, and public events in nineteen countries, released three albums, and been featured on National Public Radio and on television (see her music website, www.expandinguniverse.org). In their attempt to bring the modern universe to the public, Abrams and Primack have spoken at over a hundred venues around the world, from universities including Berkeley, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, Oxford and Cambridge, to the Senate Chamber of France and the U.S. Treasury.
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Joel Primack's research has mainly been in relativistic quantum field theory and in cosmology and particle astrophysics, a field that he has helped to create. In collaboration with UCSC astronomers George Blumenthal and Sandra Faber and others, he developed the ``Cold Dark Matter'' (CDM) theory, which has helped to set the agenda for theoretical and observational cosmology for two decades. More recently, he has been using the largest supercomputers as well as analytic and semi-analytic techniques to investigate the implications of various hypotheses regarding the identity of the dark matter for the formation and distribution of galaxies. He also works on science and technology policy and on the cultural implications of the ongoing revolution in cosmology. He has developed computer games for teaching relativity and quantum mechanics, and cosmological computer visualizations. Primack was director of the 1986 Theoretical Advanced Study Institute at UCSC, and co-director of the 1995 Enrico Fermi school on Dark Matter at Varenna, Italy. He is P.I. of grants from NSF and NASA, and he and others at UCSC raised funds from NSF in 1997 create the UCSC Scientific Visualization Laboratory and in 2001 to create the UCSC UpsAnd Beowulf Computer Laboratory.
In the 1970s, Primack helped to create what is now called the Standard Model of particle physics; for example, in 1972, with Ben Lee and Sam Trieman he did the first calculation of the mass of the charmed quark using renormalizable electroweak theory. Primack's recent research has concentrated on the nature of the dark matter that comprises most of the mass in the universe. He and Heinz Pagels were the first to suggest that the dark matter might be the lightest supersymmetric partner particle. He also investigated the possibility that some of the dark matter might be light neutrinos (hot dark matter). He and his students and other collaborators have analyzed many variants of CDM - especially CDM with less than a critical density of matter and a compensating cosmological constant (CDM) - and confronted the predictions of these models with a wide range of observational data. With his former graduate student Rachel Somerville (UCSC PhD 1997, now at Space Telescope Science Institute), Primack developed new techniques for semianalytic modeling of galaxy formation. He and his former graduate student Ari Maller (PhD 1999, now a postdoc at the University of Massachusetts) are investigating implications of gas clouds at high redshift. Primack, his students, and his former graduate students James Bullock (PhD 1999, Hubble Fellow at Harvard 2002-04, now an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine) and Risa Wechsler (Hubble Fellow at the University of Chicago) have been investigating high-redshift galaxies using the high-resolution simulations of Anatoly Klypin (New Mexico State University) and Andrey Kravtsov (University of Chicago). Another project with Bullock and Somerville involves working out the absorption of high-energy gamma rays as a probe of galaxy formation
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