Where do we come from? Where are we going? These questions are common to the entire humankind, and especially deeply rooted in Polynesian and East Asian cultures. We built a new $100M instrument to study these questions mounted on the Subaru telescope atop Maunakea. It will explore how stars and galaxies are born in the gravitational womb of dark matter. It will study how the universe has been expanding and where it is going, or whether it will end. These grand questions can be studied only thanks to the pristine environment and public support on Hawaiʻi Island. PFS (to be replaced) will have 2400 eyes on the universe to conduct these studies which would have taken 1000 years otherwise.

About Dr. Murayama

Hitoshi Murayama is a well-known theoretical particle physicist who works broadly, even on astrophysics, cosmology, and condensed matter physics. He has been a professor in the University of California, Berkeley, since 2000, and is also the founding director of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) at the University of Tokyo, serving from 2007 to 2018. Born in Japan, lived in Germany for four years and in the US for 21 years, served on advisory committees around the world, he is a multicultural global denizen. In October 2014, he was invited to give a speech at the United Nations headquarters in New York about how science unites people and brings peace. He received the Yukawa Commemoration Prize in Theoretical Physics and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.