Michael Turner - The Dark Side of the Universe

How Dark Matter and Dark Energy have shaped our universe and control its destiny.

The sky is filled with hundreds of billion galaxies, all lit up by their stars. However, stars account for less than one percent of the material in the Universe, and galaxies are held together by a new form of matter — dark matter — that accounts for 1/3 of the stuff in the Universe. The other 2/3 exists as in an even more mysterious form — dark energy — which is causing the expansion of the Universe to speed up, rather than slow down and controls its destiny. Though invisible to telescopes, the dark side of the Universe has shaped what we see today and controls our destiny.

Michael S. Turner is the Rauner Distinguished Service Professor and Director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago. He is also the Vice-president of the American Physical Society and will serve as its President in 2013. From 2003 to 2006 he served as the Assistant Director of the National Science Foundation for the Mathematical and Physical Sciences. Turner received his B.S. in Physics from the California Institute of Technology (1971) and his Ph.D. in Physics from Stanford University (1978).

Turner is a Fellow of the APS, of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Turner has been honored with the Helen B. Warner Prize of the American Astronomical Society, the Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society, the Halley Lectureship at Oxford University, the Klopsteg Lecture Award of the American Association of Physics Teachers, and the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at The University of Chicago, the Dannie Heineman Prize of the American Astronomical Society/American Institute of Physics, and the Darwin Lectureship of the Royal Astronomical Society. He received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Caltech in 2006 and an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Michigan State University in 2005.

Turner has served on Advisory Committees for DOE, NASA and the NSF and led the influential National Academy study, Connecting Quarks with the Cosmos which led to a federal initiative for funding research at the intersection of physics and astronomy. His colorful transparencies have been featured in three art galleries, including a one manshow. Turner is one of the pioneers of the interdisciplinary field that has brought together cosmologists and elementary particle physicists, and his research focuses on the earliest moments of creation. His prediction that seeds of structure arose from quantum fluctuations in the early Universe was confirmed by measurements made by the WMAP satellite. His current research deals with the mystery of why the expansion of the Universe is speeding up and not slowing down.

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