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Over the past few decades, we have made incredible discoveries about how our cosmos evolved over the past 13.8 billion years. But there remains a critical gap in our knowledge: we still know very little about what happened in the first seconds after the Big Bang. Explore cosmology and the origin and nature of our world with Dan Hooper, senior scientist and head of the Theoretical Astrophysics Group at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

Hooper examines how we are using the Large Hadron Collider and other experiments to re-create the conditions of the Big Bang, and to address mysteries such as how our universe came to contain so much matter and so little antimatter. Could these tools enable us to discover the nature of dark matter and how it was formed in our universe’s first moments? Can we lift the veil on the era of cosmic inflation, which led to the creation of our world as we know it?

Join Hooper as he examines what we have recently learned and are still striving to understand about this most essential and mysterious period of time at the beginning of cosmic history. Hooper’s book, At the Edge of Time (Princeton University Press), is available for sale and signing.