19th Australian Institute of Physics Congress 2010

Date: Wednesday 8 December 2010

Time: 7pm – 8.30pm

Location: Plenary Hall 1, Ground Floor (enter via doors 5 & 6) Melbourne Convention & Exhibition Centre

UPDATE NOTICE: Due to unforseen circumstances, Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell is unfortunately not able to attend to present the lecture originally planned: Will the World end in 2012? The Astronomical Evidence.  The lecture will now be presented by Professor Bruce Allen, entitled: “Einstein’s Legacy, and the Search for Gravitational Waves”

Admittance: FREE – Open to the Public

Bookings essential – see details below

Professor Bruce Allen

Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics
(Albert Einstein Institute), Germany

Einstein’s “general theory of relativity”, the modern description of gravity, is his greatest legacy. It predicts the bending of light as it passes by the sun, and the collapse of stars into black holes.

Another dramatic predictions is that rapidly accelerating massive objects produce ‘waves of gravitation’ that propogate through space at the speed of light.

Later in this decade, a new generation of large ‘gravitational wave observatories’ promises to make the first direct detections of these waves. This will usher in a new way to ’see’ the universe and a new era in astronomy and astrophysics.

Profile

Bruce Allen was born in Boston in 1959. He originally planned to study Electrical Engineering, but changed majors soon after arriving at MIT, where he graduated with a BS in Physics in 1980. Allen was a Marshall Scholar at Cambridge University, where he received a PhD in Gravitational and Cosmology in 1984, working under the direction of Stephen Hawking, on problems related to the very early universe.

Allen was subsequently a postdoc at UC Santa Barbara, Tufts University and the Observatoire de Paris – Meudon. In 1989 Allen took up a faculty position at the U of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. He was promoted to full professor in 1997, around the same time that he started working on gravitational wave detection. In 2006 Allen was named a Director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (the Albert Einstein Institute) in Hannover, Germany. Allen is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics. He also directs the Einstein@Home project. Allen is married and has two children.