Solving The Biggest Mysteries Of Our Universe, With Dan Hooper

<p>Why does our universe work the way it does? What are its laws? How did it start with the Big Bang‚ and how will it end?</p> <p>Scientists like Prof. Dan Hooper from the University of Chicago use something called the Standard Model of Physics to explain our universe, but there’s one big problem: The model has black hole-sized gaps in it. What is dark matter? What is dark energy and why does it make up 70 percent of our universe? Where is all the anti-matter?</p> <p>Hooper says it will probably take a paradigm-shifting discovery to answer these questions, and that those are a once-in-a-lifetime event. But, this year, something called the <a href="https://news.uchicago.edu/story/first-results-fermilabs-muon-g-2-experiment-strengthen-evidence-new-physics"> muon G-2 experiment</a> at UChicago-affiliated Fermilab may have been just that discovery. It threatens to break the “standard model” and open a whole new kind of physics. Hooper explains it all, and responds to our previous episode with <a href="https://news.uchicago.edu/big-brains-podcast-taking-aliens-seriously-avi-loeb"> Harvard’s Avi Loeb about aliens</a>.</p> <p> </p>