ITHACA, N.Y. -- Bruce Winstein, the Samuel K. Allison Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, will discuss anti-matter and radiation left over from the big bang when he delivers three Hans A. Bethe lectures at Cornell University April 12, 14 and 19.

All three talks will be in Schwartz Auditorium of Rockefeller Hall on campus and will be open to the public without charge.

Winstein will present his first physics colloquium, "The Allure of the Neutral Kaons," on April 12 at 4:30 p.m. He will review what has been learned about anti-matter and its place in the universe.

The talk Wednesday, April 14, at 7:30 p.m. will be on the topic "Startling Revelations About Our Universe," and it will be for a more-general audience. Winstein will describe the current understanding of how the universe began, what it is made of, how large it is, how it is currently evolving and how the great open questions that remain are being addressed.

A second physics colloquium, "Searching for Patterns in the Polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation," will be delivered Monday, April 19, at 4:30 p.m. In this talk, Winstein will describe the difficulties and challenges in measuring the polarization of the background radiation and how such measurements can potentially reveal properties of the universe at its earliest possible moments.

The Bethe Lectures, established by Cornell's Department of Physics and College of Arts and Sciences, honors Hans A. Bethe, Cornell professor emeritus of physics, whose description of the nuclear processes powering the sun won him the Nobel Prize in physics in 1967. The lectures have been given annually since 1977.