Date: Saturday 30-Sep-2017
Time: 10:00-12:00 pm
Location: Physics Lecture Hall 1410, Physics Building
Speaker: Peter Shawhan (UMD Physics)
Title: Relativity and the discovery of gravitational waves
Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity revolutionized our understanding of space and time. The theory predicted several new phenomena which were surprising at first, but have in fact beenverified over the years.
Gravitational waves, predicted by the theory and indirectly inferred from measurements of binary pulsar systems, were finally observed directly by the Advanced LIGO detectors in September 2015.
In this lecture, I will tell the story of how we discovered these waves and what we have learned from them about black holes in the universe.
