Barry Barish will present “Einstein, Black Holes and a Cosmic Chirp” Thursday, June 16, 2016, at 2 p.m. in the Bldg. 362 Auditorium. A High Energy Physics Spark Lecture, the event is co-hosted by the Director’s Special Colloquium Series and is programmed for a wide audience.
Barish will discuss how Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves 100 years ago and the recent observation from a pair of merging black holes by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO). The physics of gravitational waves, the detection technique, the observation and its implications will also be discussed.
Barry Barish is an experimental physicist. He is a Linde Professor of Physics, emeritus at California Institute of Technology and a leading expert on gravitational waves. Barish earned his B.A. in physics (1957) and Ph.D. in experimental particle physics (1962) at the University of California, Berkeley. He came to Caltech as a postdoc in 1963, where he has pursued his academic and research careers. Barish’s primary research interest has been the LIGO, where he became principal investigator in 1994 and director in 1997. He led the effort through the final design stages, approval for funding by the NSF National Science Board in 1994, and then the construction and commissioning of the LIGO interferometers in Livingston, LA and Hanford, WA. In 1997, he created the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC), which now enables more than 1000 collaborators worldwide to participate in LIGO.