Scott Dodelson

I am a cosmologist working at Fermilab and teaching at the University of Chicago. My research centers on the universe at large. What is the Universe made of? Why does it have the structure we see today? How did it evolve from from its hot, smooth origins?

As we look farther away from the Earth, we see objects as they were longer and longer ago. We see the sun as it was 8 minutes ago, the nearest star as it was 4 years ago, and distant galaxies as they were billions of years ago. The challenge is to organize all this information about our past into a coherent view of the universe.

Now is the best time to be a cosmologist. We are far from the unsubstantiated ideas of the past, since we now have data to back up our theories. But, we are also far from the certitude of the future, since many questions remain. These questions link together particle physics (the study of the very small) with cosmology (the study of the very large).