Princeton University Evnin Public Lecture/Princeton Center for Theoretical Science - TIME CORRECTED to 8 PM

Over the last two decades, powerful new observations have lent overwhelming support to the idea that everything in the visible Universe emerged fourteen billion years ago from a Big Bang. But was caused the Bang? And was the Bang the beginning of time? Recently, unified theories of high energy physics have allowed us to build mathematical models of the Bang and to test them with new observations. The lecture will discuss two possibilities: one in which the Universe began at the Bang, and the other in which the Bang was a violent event in a pre-existing Universe. The two pictures lead to radically different theories of the evolution of the universe and our ultimate future.