Monthly Talk and End of Year Celebration
About this event
As the festive season approaches, the RSWA would like to invite you to the End of Year monthly talk, which will held at the UWA Club, with free drinks and nibbles afterwards.
Professor David Blair will be giving a presentation on “UNCOVERING EINSTEIN’S NEW UNIVERSE”.
Abstract
Einstein gave us a vision of a new universe in which time and space are warped and rippling in response to everything else in the universe. Vast bursts of energy in the form of ripples of pure and empty space are passing through us at light speed, carrying messages about a dying universe and about the places where space, time and matter all cease to exist.
It took a century of struggle to understand Einstein’s prophesy. Einstein doubted his own predictions, and eventually it took 1000 physicists to detect his greatest prophecy of all, gravitational waves.
The definitive proof of Einstein’s new universe began with donkey trains and sailing ships at Wallal in 1922. A century of struggle by an array of eccentric and determined scientists brought us to the era of gravitational wave astronomy where our detectors, like bionic ears, have given us a brand new sense, an ability to hear across the vast scale of the universe.
The uncovering of Einstein’s new universe has a strong Australian perspective, from the Wallal Expedition, instigated by Alexander Ross of the University of Western Australia, to the Australia-wide team that participated in the discovery of gravitational waves and continues to lead national efforts in gravitational wave discovery.
The story of the uncovering of Einstein’s new universe is a mixture of inspiration, technical skill, collaboration, human nature and politics. It is a story about how science is done and how the struggle for understanding changed the way we understand the space we all inhabit.
Bibliography
David Blair is a gravitational wave physicist who has spent more than 4 decades developing methods for the detection of gravitational waves. In 1984 he invented the sapphire clock. During the 1990s he set up the Gingin gravitational wave research centre. The Gingin centre researched techniques which were implemented in the LIGO gravitational wave detectors that eventually detected gravitational waves in 2015. He is a founding member of the OzGrav Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery.
In 2003 Blair founded the Gravity Discovery Centre – a major Centre for the promotion of science in Western Australia. In 2010 Blair and collaboration partners developed the Science Education Enrichment Project that evolved into the Einstein-First Project which aims to introduce Einsteinian Physics at an early age. In 2019 a 7-nation international collaboration was funded with the aim of re-designing the entire school curriculum starting at primary school, to reflect the modern understanding of space, time, matter and radiation.
Blair is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and the American Physical Society. He shared the Breakthrough Prize with all members of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration in 2016 and in 2020 he was a recipient of the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science.
Blair recently published “Uncovering Einstein’s New Universe” that traces the journey of discovery from the confirmation of general relativity in Western Australia in 1922, to the discoveries of gravitational waves that have revealed a universe full of colliding black holes.