by Marina KHALIZEVA, journalist Today astronomy has become a center of gravity of scientific discoveries. For centuries, it was considered the most conservative field of knowledge, but impressive achievements of the last decades have changed this standpoint. What is the crux of recent cosmological breakthroughs, how do they change our perception of the Universe and what should we know about it, how the Large Hadron Collider—the biggest experimental unit in the world built in a quiet suburb of Swiss Geneva-will contribute to these "modest aspirations"? Academician Valery Rubakov, who in May 2010 delivered a lecture at a joint seminar of scientists working on the CMS detector of the European collider organized at the RAS Institute for Nuclear Research (Moscow), answered these questions. This lecture, supposed to be an ordinary event, turned out a real success. Among those who attended the lecture of Rubakov, a recognized specialist in the quantum theory of the field, particle physics and cosmology, Professor of the Department of Physics at the Lomonosov Moscow State University, chief scientific assistant of the Theoretical Physics Department at the Institute for Nuclear Research, and finally, the youngest RAS academician (elected in 1997 at the age of 42), were not only his close colleagues. The organizers arranged video broadcasting of the lecture, which enabled employees of the European Center for Nuclear Research (Switzerland), scientists from Novosibirsk, Tomsk, Omsk, Dubna, Gatchina and other Russian science towns to virtually attend the lecture. According to the lecturer, cosmology has become an exact science recently. Scientists are obtaining quantitative data that characterize both modern state of the Universe and its evolution right from the first seconds after the Big Bang. Based on these data, scientists made a general conclusion: the available information on the fundamental particles and interrelations between them, forming basis of ... Read more