Patricia Burchat studies the universe's most basic ingredients -- the mysterious dark energy and dark matter that are massively more abundant than the visible stars and galaxies. She is one of the founders of the BaBar Collaboration at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, a project that's hoping to answer the question, "If there are as many anti-particles as there are particles, why can't we see all these anti-particles?"
She's a member of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope project, which will allow scientists to monitor exploding supernovae and determine how fast the universe is expanding -- and map how mass is distributed throughout the universe. She's also part of Fermilab Experiment E791, studying the production and decay of charmed particles. Burchat received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005.
“By the time I arrived at Stanford, I knew I was a reductionist at heart. I am most interested in trying to understand nature at its most fundamental level.” — Patricia Burchat
Spiral galaxies are a stunning sight. As Don Lincoln explains in one of this week’s TED-Ed lessons, these galaxies were thought to rotate in highly predictable dances, with stars close to the center moving slowly and stars further away rotating quickly because they are pulled by the mass of the stars between them and the […]
Continue readingTo celebrate March 8, International Women’s Day, we suggest these four TEDTalks gems from some amazing speakers — artists, scientists and economists who think deeply about the role of women. Author and activist Isabel Allende discusses women, creativity, feminism — and the power of passionate thinkers and doers: The former Finance Minister of Nigeria, Ngozi […]
Continue readingDr. Stephen Hawking has made a $100 bet that the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, which throws its first beam tomorrow, will not find the elusive particle knows as the Higgs boson. What makes the Higgs the most highly sought-after particle in physics? In his TEDTalk, Brian Cox describes the Higgs particle “in language a […]
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