In particle physics, scientists study the properties of the smallest bits of matter and how they interact. Another branch of physics—astrophysics—creates and tests theories about what’s happening across our vast universe.
While particle physics and astrophysics appear to focus on opposite ends of a spectrum, scientists in the two fields actually depend on one another. Several current lines of inquiry link the very large to the very small.
For one, particle physicists and astrophysicists both ask questions about the growth of the early universe.
In her office at Stanford University, Eva Silverstein explains her work parsing the mathematical details of the fastest period of that growth, called cosmic inflation.
“To me, the subject is particularly interesting because you can understand the origin of structure in the universe,” says Silverstein, a professor of physics at Stanford and the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology. “This paradigm known as inflation accounts for the origin of structure in the most simple and beautiful way a physicist can imagine.”
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