Innsbruck Physics Lecture (hybrid lecture) - Tue, 19 October 2021, 17:15 (lecture hall A and online)
Rainer Weiss – Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge
Rainer Weiss was born in 1932 in Berlin. His family left Germany for Czechoslovakia and emigrated to the United States in 1939. He studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and received his PhD there in 1962. After a few years at Tufts University, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University. In 1964 he joined the physics faculty at MIT, where he became an emeritus professor in 2001.
Rainer Weiss’ work focuses on atomic clocks, cosmic background radiation measurements and gravitational wave detection, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017.
The beginning of gravitational wave astronomy: current state and future
The first detection of gravitational waves was made in September 2015 with the measurement of the coalescence of two ~30 solar mass black holes at a distance of about 1 billion light years from Earth. The talk will begin with some of the history leading to the discovery and description of the technology used in the detection. A review will be given of more recent measurements of black hole events as well as the first detection of the coalescence of two neutron stars and the beginning of multi-messenger astronomy. The talk will end with a discussion of some prospects for the new field.
Previous lectures
Joachim Ulrich, Linking the International System of Units to Fundamental Constants. >>
(22 Oktober 2019)
Francis Halzen, IceCube: Opening a New Window on the Universe from the South Pole. >>
(30 Oktober 2018)
Dan Shechtman, QUASI-PERIODIC CRYSTALS – A PARADIGM SHIFT IN CRYSTALLOGRAPHY >>
(17 Oktober 2017)
Paul Corkum, Probi6g quantum systems from the inside – on the attosecond time scale >>
(10 November 2016)
Alain Aspect, Institut d'Optique Graduate School, Palaiseau, France >>
(10 November 2015)
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)