Professor Barry C. Barish from Caltech and UC Riverside will be the featured speaker for the first SISSA Colloquia of the year, with a talk titled "Probing the Universe with Gravitational Waves". In 2017, Professor Barish was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics along with Rainer Weiss and Kip Thorne "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves".
The discovery of gravitational waves, predicted by Einstein in 1916, is enabling both important tests of the theory of general relativity, and the birth of a new astronomy. Modern astronomy, using all types of electromagnetic radiation, is giving us an amazing understanding of the complexities of the universe, and how it has evolved. Now, gravitational waves and neutrinos are beginning to give us the opportunity to pursue some of the same astrophysical phenomena in very different ways, as well as to observe phenomena that cannot be studied with electromagnetic radiation. The detection of gravitational waves and the emergence and prospects for this exciting new science will be explored.
The first Colloquium of 2020 will be held Monday, January 27th at 6PM, in the P. Budinich Main Lecture Hall.
Image credits: ESA,CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO