Connecting Quarks with the Cosmos Eleven Science Questions for the New Century (2003) / Chapter Skim
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Executive Summary
Executive Summary
Pages 1-8
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The answers to these questions strain the limits of human ingenuity, but the questions themselves are crystalline in their clarity and simplicity. In framing this report, the committee has seized on 11 particularly direct questions that encapsulate most of the physics and astrophysics discussed here.
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Astronomers have shown that the objects in the universe, from galaxies a million times smaller than ours to the largest clusters of galaxies, are held together by a form of matter different from what we are made of and that gives off no light. This matter probably consists of one or more as-yetundiscovered elementary particles, and aggregations of it produce the gravitational pull leading to the formation of galaxies and large-scale structures in the universe.
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Densities beyond nuclear densities occur and can be probed in neutron stars, and still higher densities and temperatures existed in the early universe. Are There Additional Space-Time Dimensions?
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By measuring the basic properties of the universe, of black holes, and of elementary particles in very different ways, we can either falsify this ambitious vision of the universe or establish it as a central part of our scientific view. The science, remarkable in its richness, cuts across the traditional boundaries of astronomy and physics.
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Within these recommendations the committee discusses six future projects that are critical to realizing the great opportunities before us. Three of them the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, and the Constellation-X Observatory were previously identified and recommended for priority by the 2001 National Research Council decadal survey of astronomy, Astronomy and Astrophysics in the New Millennium, on the basis of their ability to address important problems in astronomy.
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The committee recommends that NASA, NSF, and DOE undertake research and development to bring the needed experiments to fruition. Cosmic inflation holds that all the structures we see in the universe today galaxies, clusters of galaxies, voids, and the great walls of galaxies originated from subatomic quantum fluctuations that were stretched to astrophysical size during a tremendous spurt of expansion (inflation)
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The NRC's most recent astronomy decadal survey recommended the Constellation-X Observatory and the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna on the basis of their great potential for astronomical discovery. These missions will be able to uniquely test Einstein's theory in regimes where gravity is very strong: near the event horizons of black holes and near the surfaces of neutron stars.
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The committee recommends that the agencies cooperate in bringing together the different scientific communities that can foster this rapidly developing field. Unique laboratory facilities such as high-power lasers, high-energy accelerators, and plasma confinement devices can be used to explore physics in extreme environments as well as to simulate the conditions needed to understand some of the most interesting objects in the universe, including amma-rav bursts.
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