Each year, the University of Tulsa's Presidential Lecture Series hosts distinguished speakers on a range of fascinating topics; all lectures are free to the public. The Presidential Lecture Series is sponsored by The Darcy O'Brien Endowed Chair and supported by the University's Office of the Provost. TU's next Presidential Lecturer will be Frank Wilczek, the well-known theoretical physicist and mathematician who's also a professor at MIT. Wilczek's talk begins at 7:30pm on Thursday the 27th; it happens in the Reynolds Center, at 3208 East 8th Street, and reservations are not required. (You can learn more about this open-to-everyone address here.) A long-respected expert on such cutting-edge concepts as dark matter, string theory, quantum physics, and (more recently) the God particle, Wilczek was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004 for his work on the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction --- work that he first began when he was 21 years old. His address at TU will focus on "Expanding the Doors of Perception" --- and this talk is largely built upon his 2008 book, "The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces." Wilczek is our guest on ST today, and we chat about this book in detail --- but we also, of course, speak about last week's exciting, headline-grabbing announcement from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics regarding --- as one writer for The New Yorker put it recently --- "the observable afterglow of the Big Bang."