The Big Bang was like an enormous particle physics experiment conducted 13.7 billion years ago - except someone forgot to build the detectors. This lecture will take a tour through particle cosmology, showing how the wreckage from the Big Bang experiment is pieced together into a picture extending back to the first picoseconds and show how results from the Large Hadron Collider, Planck satellite and future experiments will help us towards the ultimate goal of a complete history of the Universe.

Our knowledge of the complex process of star formation is frustrated by enshrouding, smoke-like dust, obscuring the view of conventional telescopes. In this lecture, Professor Oliver will demonstrate how infrared cameras on telescopes in space can detect the signals from this ‘smoke’ and probe the underlying star formation in distant galaxies. He will show how maps of the sky have uncovered hundreds of thousands of distant galaxies and will discuss what we have learnt from these studies about star formation.

One of the greatest mysteries of cosmology for the last half century has been the question of why the Universe contains so much matter but little or no antimatter. Just after the Big Bang, matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts – about a billion times as much as there is matter today. These then interacted and annihilated, leaving behind background radiation that floods the Universe. But it also left behind a tiny excess of matter, which constitutes all of the planets and stars and galaxies that we see around us. Why did this happen?

Professor Harris's research centres around a beautiful and subtle experiment – widely regarded as one of the most important projects in UK particle physics – that links a structural asymmetry of fundamental particles, on the tiniest scale imaginable, to the grand cosmic asymmetry that is responsible for the existence of all of the matter in the Universe.