Lecture: “Gravitational Waves and Binary Black Holes”

Wednesday, March 14, 2018, from 4:30 p.m. 19 h
Dumontet Grand Amphitheater, Triolet Campus
Free admission for all ages

Lecture on physics and mathematics by Thibault Damour, 2017 CNRS Gold Medalist, Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques.

Conference Summary

Gravitational waves and black holes are two of the most groundbreaking predictions of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity. These two predictions emerged as soon as the theory was discovered in 1916. However, it took some fifty years of theoretical development to begin to grasp their physical significance, and a hundred years to confirm their existence in the real world. We will present the experimental and theoretical aspects of the recent detection, by the two American LIGO interferometers and the European Virgo interferometer, of gravitational waves emitted during the final orbits and the merger of several binary black hole systems, and, more recently, of a binary neutron star system. These
detections provided the first direct evidence of the existence of both gravitational waves and black holes, and ushered in a new way of observing the Universe: gravitational-wave astronomy.

Speaker Introduction

Thibault Damour is a theoretical physicist, a professor at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, and the recipient of the 2017 CNRS Gold Medal. He is internationally renowned for his groundbreaking work on black holes, pulsars, gravitational waves, and quantum cosmology.
Thibault Damour is the (co-)author of several books on physics, including:

• Conversations on the Diversity of the World with Jean-Claude Carrière; Thibault Damour, Jean-Claude Carrière, Odile Jacob; Paperback, 2014;
• If Einstein Were Told to Me, by Thibault Damour, Le Cherche-Midi, 2012; Champs Flammarion, 2016.

He is a co-writer of the comic book The Mystery of the Quantum World with Mathieu Burniat (Dargaud, 2016), winner of the literary prize “Is the square root of a word a square?”. This award, established by a teacher at Jean Monnet High School in Montpellier, recognizes a literary work that explores mathematics. From a shortlist of five books that combine mathematical content with literary merit, high school and college students vote for their favorite book.
The winner is traditionally announced during the Math Week, under the auspices of theIREM (Institute for Research ), which is part of the DESciRE Educational Support Service on the Triolet Campus. On this occasion, many high school students come to present their work before the winner is announced.