Speaker:
Virginia Trimble
Institution:
UC Irvine, Dept. of Phys. & Astron.
Speaker Link:
Date:
Thursday, February 27, 2014
Time:
3:30 pm
Location:
RH 101
ABSTRACT:
The first Texas Symposium of "Gravitational Collapse and other Topics in Relativistic Astrophysics" was convened in December 1963 in Dallas, Texas. The next few were in Austin, New York, back to Texas, and so forth. But the venues have since wandered to Germany, Israel, Australia, Canada, Brazil, and (looking ahead to 2015 ND 2017) probably to Geneva and Cape Town, South Africa. The initial motivating science included the discovery of the first Quasi Stellar Radio Sources (quasars) in spring, 1963 and the idea of gravitational collapse as an energy source for them and for strong radio emission form a few galaxies. The subject matter quickly expanded to take in pulsars, neutron stars and black holes in X-ray emitting binary star systems, the 3K microwave background and al other aspects of cosmology, gamma ray bursts, cosmic rays, and indeed just about everything with either high energy per particle or photon or high energy per event or object, like supernovae, not to mention various possible ways of looking for dark matter, dark energy, and other possibly missing components of the universe. The talk will describe some epoch December 2013 observations, experiments, and theories concerning these topics and others. The technology may be a bit primitive because the speaker learned that the presentation was wanted on rather short notice.
Mini CV:
Virginia Trimble is professor of physics and astronomy at UCI (the oldest member of the faculty now on full active duty) and, for 28 years oscillated back and forth between UCI and University of Maryland at a frequency of 31.7 nanoHertz, along with her late husband, Joseph Weber, the developer of the first detectors aimed at gravitational waves. No detections of these reported at the 2013 Golden Jubilee meeting in Dallas. She is a graduate of Hollywood High School, UCLA Caltech, and holds honorary degrees from the Universities of Cambridge (MA) and Valencia (Dottora h.c.). Her first Texas symposium was the 1967 Third in New York, and recent ones at which she has spoken were held in Vancouver, Heidelberg, and Sao Paulo, Brazil, as well as Dallas.
Host:
Manoj Kaplinghat