Gresham College provides outstanding educational talks and videos for the public free of charge. There are over 2,500 videos available on our website. Your support will help us to encourage people's love of learning for many years to come.
What are the implications of the Big Bang for our understanding of ourselves? Is the universe meaningless? or is there some way of developing a ‘big picture’ of reality that helps us decide our place and purpose in the universe.
Matter consists of a mêlée of elementary particles. There are protons and neutrons, made up of quarks, and many other short-lived massive particles. One hope is to discover particles of dark matter, but this has so far eluded our best efforts.
Can a scientific theory ever be confirmed? Must a scientific theory be falsifiable? Theories such as that of the multiverse and string theory will be considered.
In the first three minutes after the beginning of the universe, all of the stuff that we and the Earth are made of were created and the universe attained its huge size, homogeneity and isotropy.