Browsing School of Physics Public Lectures by Title
Now showing items 1-20 of 47
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10 Years of Southern Stargazing: How Star Trek Changed Everything
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2017-04-06)This public lecture by Glenn Burns, chief meteorologist of WSB-TV, is one of three events to celebrate 10 Years of Southern Stargazing at the Georgia Tech Observatory. The destination for the 1960s Apollo missions was ... -
100 years of Einstein's Gravity
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2015-11-02)Curved spacetime, relativistic time, black holes and gravitational waves are just a few topics in Einstein’s theory of gravity called Special and General Relativity. Professors Cadonati and Shoemaker will take you on a ... -
Aeons Before the Big Bang?
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009-03-24)There is much impressive observational evidence, mainly from the cosmic microwave background (CMB), for an enormously hot and dense early stage of the universe referred to as the Big Bang. Observations of the CMB are now ... -
The Astrophysics of Supermassive Black Holes
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2014-10-21)Black holes are perhaps the most mysterious and enigmatic objects that one can imagine. Their gravitational fields are so strong that light is unable to escape their grasp, and even fundamental quantities such as space ... -
Baby Galaxies: The First Steps toward the Milky Way
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2013-11-18)Our Milky Way is a beautiful spiral galaxy and has been constantly growing since the beginning of time. How did the ancestors of the Milky Way form and look in the first billion years of the universe? Before galaxies form, ... -
Binary Neutron Star Merger GW170817: A Multi-sensory Experience of the Universe
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2018-02-13)August 17, 2017, is a milestone date for astrophysics. For the first time, the LIGO and Virgo gravitational-wave observatories detected signals from the collision of two neutron stars. The powerful event shook space-time ... -
Celebration of 2018 Physics Nobel Prize: Lighting the way with microscopic tractor beams and sculpted laser pulse
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2018-10-23)The 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics recognizes two breakthrough inventions in laser physics. The first, optical tweezers, allows scientist and engineers to use lasers like the tractor beams of Star Trek to manipulate everything ... -
Chaotic Music and Fractal Art: A Glimpse into the Neurophysiology of Aesthetics
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2016-01-27)The enjoyment of music and art are uniquely human experiences. Yet we still do not understand the attributes that lead us to appreciate some artistic works and not others. In this talk I will address how concepts in ... -
The Coffee-Ring Effect and the Physics of Breakfast
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2015-11-30)As anyone who has ever spilled coffee knows, liquids that contain suspended particles tend to leave ring-shaped stains when they dry. This ubiquitous phenomenon has been observed for thousands of years, but the physics ... -
Cosmic Rays: Alien Invaders from Outer Space
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2013-12-02)Cosmic rays are microscopic, charged particles that permanently bombard Earth from outer space. 100 years after their discovery their origin is still a mystery. It is also not clear how cosmic rays can obtain energies that ... -
Cosmology and Exoplanets: Unpacking the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2019-10-22)Cosmology studies the universe at the largest scales, applying the laws of physics over billions of light years and all the way back to the universe's infancy. In dozens of groundbreaking publications, Jim Peebles laid the ... -
Cube-Shaped Poo and Georgia Tech's Second Ig Nobel Prize
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2019-10-08)How does a wombat produce cube-shaped feces? How long does it take an elephant to urinate? Answering these two questions have landed David Hu two Ig Nobel Prizes, awards given at Harvard University for research that ... -
Dark matter, and how we would not be alive without it
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2012-08-30)Most of the mass in the Universe is of some unknown form of matter. While we have some guesses what it might be we are not sure. In this talk for a non-specialist audience, Professor Abel will explain how observations using ... -
Distant Horizons: New Worlds in an Age of Discovery
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2014-11-18)Great voyages of exploration have always been driven in large part by an insatiable curiosity to know what is beyond the furthest horizon you can see. Five hundred years ago, the European exploration of the globe was a ... -
Einstein's Cosmos and the Quantum: Origin of Space, Time, and Large-Scale Structure of the Universe
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2017-11-14)For over two millennia, civilizations have pondered over the questions of cosmogenesis. But serious attempts to address them began only with Einstein's discovery of general relativity a century ago. Advances over the past ... -
Exploring the Inner Structure of Active Galactic Nuclei by Reverberation
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2016-10-31)The innermost structure of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) consists of an accretion disk surrounding a supermassive black hole and, on somewhat larger scales, rapidly moving diffuse gas. The ultraviolet through near IR ... -
Forecasting Turbulence
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2018-11-26)Fluid turbulence is one of the greatest unsolved problems of classical physics (and the subject of a million dollar mathematical (Millenium) challenge). Centuries of research--including Leonardo da Vinci’s observations ... -
From Molecules to Migration: How Quantum Physics Can Explain the Compass of Birds
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2018-02-05)The world of quantum physics appears mysterious, even spooky, and far removed from everyday phenomena we can observe in the world around us. Especially the realm of living organisms was thought to be far too disorganized ... -
From Urination to Georgia Tech's First Ig Nobel Prize
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2015-10-19)How long does an elephant urinate? How quickly does a dog shake? How many eyelashes does a camel have? Asking a new and sometimes strange question is arguably the most important step in advancing science, and not any less ... -
History of the Universe from the Beginning to End and the James Webb Space Telescope
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2012-10-22)The history of the universe in a nutshell, from the Big Bang to now, and on to the future – John Mather will tell the story of how we got here, how the Universe began with a Big Bang, how it could have produced an Earth ...