Lectures on Gravitational Waves

This and next week I will be giving a series of lectures on "Gravitational Waves" at the Escola de Astrofísica e Gravitação (EAG8) at IST (Lisbon) and at the international school Invisible16 at SISSA (Trieste), respectively. The lectures at SISSA will be also recorded.

Some material related to the lectures (references, problems and notebooks) can be found here (this is still work in progress, since I am still preparing the problems and the Mathematica notebooks...)

The poster of EAG8

The poster of Invisible16

One cannot get rich with fundamental physics, they said...

..unless you make a landmark discovery such as the first detection of gravitational waves. In such case, you might win a $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics!

The three funding fathers of LIGO, Ronald P. Drever and Kip. S. Thorne and Rainer Weiss, are going to share $1 million, and the other other $2 million will be split among 1,012 scientists who authored the milestone article in Physical Review Letters and a list of key contributors to the theoretical and experimental understanding of gravitational waves (Luc Blanchet, Thibault Damour, Lawrence Kidder, Frans Pretorius,
Mark Scheel, Saul A. Teukolsky, Rochus E. Vogt) without which LIGO outstanding discovery would not have been possible.

As Richard Feynman brilliantly put it:

This also applies to the economical reward that might following great discoveries, and it is probably the reason why reckless and economically inconvenient science is pursed: because it is passion driven rather than money driven.

Kudos to the LIGO/Virgo Collaboration!

Kip Thorne among the 100 most influential people...

....and the one with the best outfit on Time!

Kip Thorne, our bet for the next Nobel Laureate in Physics, more badass than Walter White.

Unlock the Gravitational Universe - Black Holes, Compact Binaries, the Big Bang

This trailer is not for a movie, it's not for a TV show and it's not for a computer game. This trailer is for the largest instrument ever built by humanity. An enormous space-based gravitational wave detector that will measure distortions of space-time, revolutionize astronomy, our understanding of physics, and the past and future of our cosmos. That's it really.....enjoy! :)

LISA Mission / eLISA Mission

Song: "First Hero" by Vera Ohl (musicfox UG)

LIGO Magazine

Here the annoucement by Gabriela Gonzalez (LSC spokesperson):

The US-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is supported by an international group of more than 800 scientists from about 80 institutions, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC, http://www.ligo.org).

Following the examples of other large science projects we decided to create the LIGO Magazine, a regular publication to exchange information, news and stories from and with the LSC community. The inaugural issue is now available, with more than 30 pages of entertaining stories and fascinating photos from the installation of the Advanced LIGO detectors.

We believe that the magazine is also a good way to find out more about LIGO and the gravitational wave community, and to satisfy your general interest in science and technology. Therefore the magazine is available as a free download (pdf file) at: http://www.ligo.org/magazine/

We hope you find it inspiring and entertaining. Let us know what you think and do tell your friends and colleagues by forwarding this link to them.