Princeton University Departments of Physics and Astrophysics Special Lectures in Cosmology

Inspired by recent work by E.Witten and others, twistor theory has begun to find a new role in high-energy physics. The theory is specifically tuned (though not exclusively) to treating particles without mass, and it calls upon mathematical ideas of many-variable complex analysis and cohomology. This talk outlines the main ideas (using many visual illustrations), and some new work will be presented showing how the theory fits elegantly into a cosmological setting, where a positive cosmological constant (or "dark energy") is taken into account.