2025 Ta-You Wu Lecture in Physics | Einstein, Gravitational Waves, Black Holes and Other Matters

Join us in person for this lecture, or tune in via livestream at: https://myumi.ch/MkzmE

More than a hundred years ago, Einstein predicted that there were ripples in the fabric of space-time traveling at the speed of light: gravitational waves. On September 14, 2015, the LIGO detectors in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana in the US registered for the first time ever a loud gravitational wave signal traveling through Earth, created more than a billion years ago by the merger of two black holes. A spectacular signal was detected by LIGO and the Virgo detector in Europe in 2017, produced by the collision of two neutron stars, giving birth to a black hole, generating also electromagnetic waves (light!) detected by many telescopes and helping us understand the origin of gold. In only a few years from the first detection, there are now hundreds of new signals from mergers of black holes and/or neutron stars - this is the era of gravitational wave astronomy. We will describe the history and details of the observations, and the gravity-bright future of the field.