An Expanding Universe: My Experience with the 2008 Cosmology Workshop By Serena Wang

In one’s education, there are always one or two learning experiences that change one’s outlook on life forever. Whether it’s a month long camp in the mountains, or just an hour-long lesson in a classroom, these milestones in learning can open the mind to radical new ideas, and suddenly make the world seem like a much larger place.

After completing the 2008 Physics in and through Cosmology Workshop, I feel it fully deserves the title educational milestone. Before I attended it, my interests went no further than the latest trends in music, sports, and fashion. After I graduated from the workshop, I realized just how narrow that view of the world really was. The teachers at the workshop showed me that there is so much more out there, massive things such as dark matter that we have yet to understand. If the concept of the size our Milky Way galaxy already dwarfs the Earth, where does the hotly debated issue of global warming stand when there are those that are researching the movements of multiple galaxies due to dark matter?

But it’s not just the big things that make the universe so astounding. It was the smallest particles I learned about that fascinated me the most. One thing that has stuck with me from the workshop is that muons, neutrinos, and other particles as small as the galaxies are large are passing through me every second. These “cosmic rays” come anywhere from nearby bodies like the sun (which would still take a full 8 minutes to get to at the speed of light), to supernovae billions of light years away. I used to think that nothing outside our solar system would ever affect me, but now I know that the entire time I thought that, I was experiencing radiation from supernovae that weren’t even in our galaxy, let alone solar system.

The final thing that influenced me from the workshop is the physics of the universe, and how everything interacts. In particular, I was fascinated by Einstein’s theory of special relativity. In this theory, he states that time itself slows down for objects moving at extremely high speeds. To build a time machine was always considered mankind’s impossible dream, but I now know that time has been bent and stretched since long before humans even existed.

If just in one week I can become such a different person from learning all of these incredible details about the universe, I can only imagine what type of people cosmologists are from studying the subject all their lives. What I used to think would never have anything to do with me has now completely changed my life. I now realize I don’t just live in my social circle. I live on a planet, which lives in a solar system, which lives in a galaxy, which ultimately lives in a forever-expanding universe.

Serena Wang participated in the Physics Through Cosmology Workshop at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory during the summer of 2008 between her 8th grade and 9th grade school years.