Innsbruck Physics Lecture 2021
with Nobel Laureate Prof. Rainer Weiss
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge
Rainer Weiss was born in 1932 in Berlin. His family left Germany for Czechoslovakia and emigrated to the United States in 1939. He studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and received his PhD there in 1962. After a few years at Tufts University, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University. In 1964 he joined the physics faculty at MIT, where he became an emeritus professor in 2001.
Rainer Weiss’ work focuses on atomic clocks, cosmic background radiation measurements and gravitational wave detection, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017.
The beginning of gravitational wave astronomy: current state and future
The first detection of gravitational waves was made in September 2015 with the measurement of the coalescence of two ~30 solar mass black holes at a distance of about 1 billion light years from Earth. The talk will begin with some of the history leading to the discovery and description of the technology used in the detection. A review will be given of more recent measurements of black hole events as well as the first detection of the coalescence of two neutron stars and the beginning of multi-messenger astronomy. The talk will end with a discussion of some prospects for the new field.
Past Lectures
The Innsbruck Physics Lecture has welcomed many distinguished researchers to Innsbruck, among them several Nobel laureates, offering insights into current discoveries and central questions in modern physics. The archive reflects the wide range of topics covered by the series.
Joachim Ullrich
22 October 2019
Linking the International System of Units to Fundamental Constants
>> View lecture details
Francis Halzen
30 October 2018
IceCube: Opening a New Window on the Universe from the South Pole
>> View lecture details
Dan Shechtman
17 October 2017
Quasi-Periodic Crystals – A Paradigm Shift in Crystallography
>> View lecture details
Paul Corkum
10 November 2016
Probing quantum systems from the inside – on the attosecond time scale
>> View lecture details
Alain Aspect
10 November 2015
From the Einstein-Bohr debate to entangled qubits: a new quantum revolution
>> View lecture details
Michael Kramer
4 November 2014
Nearly 100 years after General Relativity: Was Einstein right?
>> View lecture details
Immanuel Bloch
22 October 2013
Controlling and Exploring Quantum Matter at the Single Atom Level
>> View lecture details
Wim Ubachs
13 November 2012
Search for a variation of fundamental constants
>> View lecture details
Reinhard Genzel
4 October 2011
Massive Black Holes and Galaxies
>> View lecture details