Saul Perlmutter is a 2011 Nobel Laureate, sharing the prize in Physics for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe. He is a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he holds the Franklin W. and Karen Weber Dabby Chair, and a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is the leader of the international Supernova Cosmology Project, and director of both the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics. His undergraduate degree was from Harvard and his PhD from UC Berkeley. In addition to other awards and honors, he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Perlmutter has also written popular articles, and has appeared in numerous PBS, Discovery Channel, and BBC documentaries. His interest in teaching scientific approaches to problem-solving for non-scientists led to Berkeley courses on Sense and Sensibility and Science and Physics & Music.

The 1998 discovery that the universe’s expansion is accelerating was not only unexpected, but also led to the idea of a previously-unknown “dark energy” forming almost three-quarters of the “stuff” that makes up the universe. How was this discovery made? How did new ways of thinking about the collection of data make this discovery possible? What has been the progress since in understanding this dark energy, the accelerating universe, and potentially the fate of the universe? In this illuminating and provoking talk Dr. Saul Perlmutter, Nobel Laureate, will describe the observations that led to the discovery of “dark energy” and how our ability to collect data at ever increasing rates is changing the way we undertake science and and the discoveries we can make.