Gravitational waves and binary black holes" conference

Wednesday, March 14, 2018 from 4:30 p.m. to 19 h
Grand Amphithéâtre Dumontet, Triolet campus
Free admission for all

Physics and mathematics lecture by Thibault Damour, 2017 CNRS Gold Medalist, Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques.

Conference summary

Gravitational waves and black holes are two of the most innovative predictions of Einstein's theory of General Relativity. Both predictions first appeared when 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 certify their existence in the real world. We will present the experimental and theoretical aspects of the recent detection, by the two American interferometers LIGO, and by the European interferometer Virgo, of gravitational waves emitted by the last orbits, and merger, of several binary systems of black holes, and, more recently, of a binary system of neutron stars. 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 presentation

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

• Entretiens sur la multitude du monde avec Jean-Claude Carrière Thibault Damour, Jean-Claude Carrière, Odile Jacob poches, 2014 ;
• Si Einstein m'était conté, Thibault Damour, Éditions Le Cherche-Midi, 2012, Éditions Champs Flammarion, 2016.

He is co-writer of the comic strip The Mystery of the Quantum World with Mathieu Burniat (Éditions Dargaud, 2016), winner of the Prix littéraire "Is the root of words square?". The prize, initiated by a teacher at Montpellier's Lycée Jean Monnet, is awarded to a literary work dealing with mathematics. From a selection of 5 works combining mathematical content and literary quality, high school and university students vote for their favorite book.
The winner is traditionally presented during the Maths Weekunder the aegis ofIREM (Institut de Research sur les Mathématiques), part of the DESciRE Pedagogy Support Service on the Triolet Campus. On this occasion, many high school students come to present their work before the winner is announced.