Physics Dean's Colloquium for 2016-10-31

Series: Physics Dean's Colloquium
Date: Monday 31-Oct-2016
Time: 4:00 pm
Location: PSC 2136
Speaker: Virginia Trimble (UC Irvine)
Title: Some Words, A Few Pictures & One Equation About the First Searches for Gravitational Waves

"Gosh, Prof. Trimble, Do You Really Remember Before Gravars?" This question derives from the last paragraph of a 1987 article Trimble wrote, at the editor's request, for Sky & Telescope. It is a good "vantage year," coming 28 years before the first report from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and 28 years after the late Joseph Weber, who was a UMD physics professor, started talking in public about building a detector for gravitational waves/radiation. Earlier landmarks were papers by Poincare, Einstein and others saying that gravitational information must travel in wave form, to tell nearby masses how to react to changing quadrupole moments of masses in their vicinity. Curiously, it took many years before all the expert gravitation physicists could agree that such waves actually carried energy. Early "yes" votes included Weber & Wheeler in 1957, and the last mainstream opponent (until his death) was Leopold Infeld. Remarkably, the LIGO announcement brought at least two remaining doubters (from Italy) out of the haystack (the one in which you look for needles). This presentation will include some melange of the theoretical debates and the first designs and construction of laboratory detectors.

Dr. Virginia Trimble is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Irvine. She was a visiting professor of astronomy at UMD from 1973 to 2003. She is also the widow of Joseph Weber, a pioneer in the search for gravitational waves who was a physics professor at UMD from 1961 until his retirement.

This page was automatically generated on: 25-Oct-2016.