"The Physics of the Big Bang" will be the subject of a free public talk from 5 to 6 p.m. Thursday on the mezzanine floor of the Cottage Bakery and Café, 14 S. Linn St. Vincent Rodgers, professor in the University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Department of Physics and Astronomy, will speak. Rodgers notes that the theory -- introduced in 1931 by a Belgian priest as a solution to Albert Einstein's Theory of General Relativity -- has stood the test of time. He plans to discuss the idea of the Big Bang and some of the experimentation that has catapulted the Big Bang theory into a household word.