The Century of Strong Gravity

The following is a popular science article that Richard, Vitor and I have written for the IST Physics Magazine "Pulsar" (here is the Facebook page) and that will also appear in the Portuguese Physics Magazine "Gazeta de Fisica". A pdf version is available here (in English), and here (in Portuguese).

1. One Hundred Years of Gravity

The latest Christopher Nolan's movie, Interstellar, is about a future human civilization able to undertake cosmic travels to black holes using special shortcuts, ``wormholes''. Science-fiction as it might seem, Interstellar screenplayers --who happen to be the Nolan brothers-- have worked side by side with Kip Thorne, a professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology and one of the fathers of modern General Relativity, the theory that explains what wormholes and black holes are and how they form in the Universe.

Thorne's contribution is to ensure that the movie --starring Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway among others-- doesn't contain scenes that would make Albert Einstein cringe.
Does this mean that travel agencies are about to sell (roundtrip!) tickets to a black hole? Not quite, but in a few years from now, theoretical physicists and astronomers will be able to study them as never before. The scientific payoff of these studies will largely overcome Interstellar's box-office, with all due respect to Mr. Nolan!

Visit to AEI

This week I was visiting the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (aka Albert Einstein Institute, AEI) in Golm, in the outskirts of Potsdam, in the outskirts of Berlin (this more or less reflects the number of connections that commuters living in Berlin have to take everyday). The location of the institute is really its only weakness because otherwise the place looks great.

Jan and I taking a selfie with Albert. The statue is located at the middle of a beautiful large indoor yard 
at the Albert Einstein Institute in Potsdam (Germany)

I was there to collaborate with Jan Steinhoff (see pic above) who was postdoc in Lisbon in the last few years and recently moved to the AEI to work in gravitational-wave group lead by the new Director of the institute, Prof. Alessandra Buonanno, a world-leading expert in gravitational-wave phenomenology (and also one of the key speakers of this upcoming workshop). While there, I gave a seminar on "Black holes as stong-gravity labs", presenting some recent results related to black-hole superradiance (a topic that I will cover in this blog soon). I've also took the opportunity to discuss with a lot of interesting people working at the AEI (and to have some German beers with Jan and Jordi Casanellas, who also moved to AEI from Lisbon).

Workshop: "Compact Objects as Astrophysical and Gravitational Probes" at the Lorentz Center (Feb 2-6, 2015)

It's a pleasure to advertise the workshop  "Compact Objects as Astrophysical and Gravitational Probes", to be held at the Lorentz Center (Leiden, The Netherlands) from February 2 through February 6.

One version of the workshop's poster, the official one will soon appear in the official webpage.
Here young Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and Albert Einstein are looking towards the most urgent questions in relativistic astrophysics, a field that has essentially emerged from their seminal works. The two young guys respectively symbolize the astrophysical and the general-relativistic communities that will gather together at this workshop, to share expertize and try to fill the gap between them.

Last June, Enrico Barausse (at the Institut Astrophysique de Paris), Tamara Bogdanovic (at Georgia Tech in Atlanta), Vitor Cardoso (at CENTRA - Instituto Superior Tecnico in Lisbon) and Elena Maria Rossi (at Leiden University in the Netherlands) and myself have applied to an international call at the Lorentz Center to organize a workshop. We initially had in mind a small-size workshop with ~20 participants, but the proposal was selected for a large-size event. Thus, in less than one month, more than 50 world-leading experts in relativistic astrophysics will gather together in what will hopefully be a fruitful and exciting meeting (here is the program and at list of participants).

Recommended by us: Interview with John Ellis

To come across John Ellis at CERN is actually not a rare event: at seminars, at coffee breaks... But probably in those situations you do not have so much courage or time to ask him what is his position about the role of science in the society, or even more when he decided to become a theoretical physicist!

If you have a kind of curiosity about these topics and other related questions, take a look at this interview: past CERN Summer Students with the kind help of the PH Newsletter have had the fortune to ask to him directly

http://ph-news.web.cern.ch/content/interview-john-ellis


Have a good read and, if you will have the patience to go until the end, you will find a final question to you.

Pre-celeberating 2015 for 100 years of Einstein's General Relativity and maybe more...

In a few weeks we will all land in the exciting year of 2015! Many people will be celebrating New Year, as usual! (but still exciting) But, unusually, gravity physicists will be celebrating 100 years of General Relativity after Albert Einstein. 

in 2015, gravitational-wave physicists, although, may have one extra celebration to do on the top of others, which is celebrating the first direct detection of gravitational waves! Advanced version of gravitational-wave detectors will start to take data in a few month, hunting wild celestial gravitational-wave sources such as black-holes and neutron-stars. I'll write more about this here some time soon. But for now, you may check out my earlier post in Gravity Room.

Anyways, just before entering in to 2015, Princeton University has recently released The Digital Einstein Papers in an open-access website which is an awesome collection and an excellent holiday reading! All the papers are in both English and German languages.

Pullback: "Che cos’è che non va?" di Enrico Persico

Di seguito pubblichiamo un pezzo di Prof. Guido Pegna (che ho avuto la fortuna di avere come professore di Elettronica all'Universita' di Cagliari) che a sua volta riporta un articolo di Enrico Persico sul Giornale di Fisica.

 A questo link trovate una serie di esperimenti realizzati da Prof. Pegna, mentre a questo link ci sono tutti gli esperimenti esposti e utilizzabili al Museo di Fisica dell'Universita' di Cagliari.

Buona lettura!

Emilio Segré, Enrico Persico e Enrico Fermi sulla spiaggia di Ostia nel 1927

Interstellar

 "Honestly, Interstellar really sucks" -- this is not quite true, but I couldn't help thinking of this scene.

When I asked my spouse whether she would come to watch latest Christopher Nolan' movie Interstellar, she replied: "No way!".

"But it's about black holes.", I said.
"Exactly." - she replied.

"But Kip Thorne, a world-famous physicist, was involved in the production.", I said.
"Even more so." - she replied.

"But the director is Christopher Nolan!", I replied.
"Indeed."

"But it's gonna be a Hollywood Blockbuster!", I continued
"Forget about it"

"But it's the movie of the year!"
"Exactly."

That was the end of the conversation. As a matter of fact, she went to watch the movie without (and even before!) me, but I guess this is normal within women logic.

Anyway, together with part of the Lisbon gang, yesterday we finally went to watch Interstellar in its iMAX curved-spacetime, relativistic glory, so now we too are entitled to talk about this movie.