Department of PhysicsOver the course of the twentieth century we have constructed a very successful fundamental theory of the behavior of matter. Viewed from this perspective, the world looks very different from our everyday reality. It is a very strange place, and a beautiful one -- in particular, we've come to understand that the building blocks of matter appear as notes in a Music of the Void. I'll describe this using a combination of facts, pictures, and jokes. Finally I'll discuss some recent discoveries indicating that the world is even stranger than we've understood so far, and how we're rising to the challenge. <Slides of the lecture in PDF format>
