David Elder Lecture: Prof. Martin Hendry, University of Glasgow

Einstein’s Universe: the dawn, and exciting future, of gravitational-wave astronomy


0:00 Livestream Start (some technical difficulties - skip to 22:01 seconds for start of presentation)
22:01 Introduction to speaker
24:30 Professor Martin Hendry
1:10:24 Questions and Answers


Gravitational waves are ripples in space-time produced by the most violent events in the cosmos: exploding stars, colliding black holes, even the Big Bang itself. They were by predicted in 1915 by Albert Einstein and detected 100 years later by the most sensitive scientific instruments ever built – a discovery awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize for Physics. And yet in just over six years the detection of gravitational waves has gone from an epoch-making breakthrough to an almost routine occurrence, with about 100 gravitational-wave events observed to date, and has opened an entirely new way for astronomers to study the universe. In this talk join Professor Martin Hendry as he explores the exciting dawn – and bright future – of gravitational-wave astronomy, and the remarkable new picture of Einstein’s universe which it is revealing to us.

Brief bio:
Martin Hendry is Professor of Gravitational Astrophysics and Cosmology at the University of Glasgow. He is a senior member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC), the global team of more than 1400 scientists which made the first ever detection of gravitational waves in 2015 – a discovery that was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. In 2015 Martin was also awarded the MBE for his services to the public understanding of science. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh.