UO physicist will discuss mysteries of universe.

Byline: Greg Bolt The Register-Guard

Starry nights aside, most of the universe is still a dark and murky place that hides enough secrets to fill textbooks and libraries for ages to come.

But science is producing surprising new tools that could shine some light into those dark corners and even spark a revolution in our understanding of everything from subatomic particles to dark matter. University of Oregon physicist Jim Brau will discuss both the mysteries still hidden in the universe and their possible solutions in a free public lecture tonight.

Brau's talk, "Realizing Einstein's Dream - Exploring Our Mysterious Universe," begins at 7 p.m. in Room 100, Willamette Hall, on the UO campus. It is part of the university's celebration of the World Year of Physics, a year-long commemoration of the 100th anniversary of Albert Einstein's "miracle year" that saw publication of three science-transforming papers on light, relativity and heat.

Brau plans to offer an overview of some of the biggest, and smallest, of the universe's remaining mysteries, from dark matter and dark energy to Higgs bosons and super-symmetric particles. And he will talk about some of the instruments now in use and in the works that could help scientists understand them.

But he promises to keep the discussion down to Earth.

"What I'm trying to do is paint a picture of the excitement, the mysteries of the universe and the activities that are going on to try to take that next leap in revolutionizing our understanding," he said. "It's for people who are willing to come and be confounded and puzzled and find it mysterious and realize that they can't understand it. We don't understand it. We're on the frontier, and that's what the frontier is all about."

After his miracle year, Einstein spent much of his life looking for a way to connect the two main forces in nature, electromagnetism and gravity, to create a single theory to explain the universe. He never succeeded, but he didn't have as many pieces of the puzzle as researchers have now.

He never knew, for instance, about the nucleus of the atom or the forces that hold it together. With what's been learned since Einstein's death, Brau said scientists are getting tantalizingly close to making another leap in understanding.

"We're trying to find the unity in the many varieties of physical phenomena that we see, both the forces that we see and the particles that are at play, and trying to find the underlying connections between them," he said. "If you're trying to unify things, you need all the pieces together, and now we have a lot of them. And we have the facilities and the plans for future facilities that are allowing us to really get the data we need to make those steps."

Among those instruments are LIGO - the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory - searching for gravity waves at a pair of installations in the United States. Others include the Large Hadron Collider being built in Switzerland and the International Linear Collider, which will be one of the largest projects in the history of science when it is built near Chicago's Fermilab.

Brau, director of the UO Center for High Energy Physics, also is one of three scientists directing the worldwide ILC project. He said the new instruments will help researchers probe deep into the nature of matter, energy and time and reveal new information about the structure of the universe.

In his talk tonight, Brau will cover a few of the particles physicists hope to find, such as the Higgs boson and super-symmetrical particles. Both have huge implications for understanding mass and gravity and uniting them with some distant phenomena, such as dark matter, the mysterious and unseen substance that seems to make up most of the mass in the universe.

Brau will even touch on string theory, a stupendously complicated bit of thinking that has the potential to be the unifying theory Einstein sought, if anybody can ever figure out how to test it.

One doesn't need to understand string theory math or have a doctorate in physics to appreciate the grand sweep of such ideas, Brau said, or to be piqued by what might be found around the next celestial corner.

"Science is about mystery, it's about the unknown, it's about going beyond what we know now," he said. "It's just the tantalizing possibility that it's out there."