Innsbruck Physics Lecture - Tue, 04. Nov. 2014, 17:15 lecture hall A
Michael Kramer - Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie, Bonn, Germany
Nearly 100 years after General Relativity: Was Einstein right?
We are only one year away from celebrating the centenary of Einstein's theory of general relativity (GR). Nearly a hundred years later, efforts in testing GR and its concepts are still being made by many colleagues around the world, using many different approaches. To date GR has passed all experimental and observational tests with flying colours, but in light of recent progress in observational cosmology in particular, the question of as to whether alternative theories of gravity need to be considered is as topical as ever. While we are all very much looking forward to the first direct detection of gravitational waves with ground-based (and hopefully, eventually, space-based) detectors, it happens that nature provides us with an almost perfect laboratory to test the strong-field regime - in the form of binary radio pulsars. This talk will present some of the recent results in the tests of general relativity and alternative theories of gravity and outlines what we can expect in the future.
Video recording of the lecture
Previous lectures
Michael Kramer - Nearly 100 years after General Relativity: Was Einstein right?>> (04 November 2014)
Immanuel Bloch - Controlling and Exploring Quantum Matter at the Single Atom Level >> (22 October 2013)
Wim Ubachs - Search for a variation of fundamental constants >> (13 November 2012)
Reinhard Genzel - Massive Black Holes and Galaxies >> (4 October 2011)
