Renowned German theoretical physicist Professor Harald Fritzsch will give a public lecture, The Big Bang and the Origin of the World, in the Kramer Building at 18h30 on Tuesday, October 17. Fritzsch holds the Chair of Theoretical Physics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He is a guest of the Centre for Theoretical Physics & Astrophysics at UCT, and his visit was made possible by a National Research Foundation (NRF) grant. Besides his scholarly contributions to the field, Fritzsch has written extensively on cosmology and the universe for lay audiences. Works such as The Curvature of Spacetime: Newton, Einstein and Gravitation, which presents imaginary conversations between Newton and Einstein and a fictitious particle physicist Adrian Haller, have been widely translated. Public interest in cosmology stems from an interest in the creation of the world and the universe, Fritzsch said. "Scientists are able to provide models of how the universe came into being and what forces shape its ongoing evolution." Though cosmologists agree on the theory of the Big Bang, much is still to be understood about the universe. "It's not only dark matter that remain unknown, but dark energy, the effect of which is that the universe is expanding at a faster and faster rate. In the past, people thought the opposite was happening."