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The University of Michigan's Department of Physics hosts the annual Ta-You Wu Lecture, which is one of the most prestigious lecture events in our Department. The Lectureship was endowed in 1991 through generous gifts from the University of Michigan Alumni Association in Taiwan. It is named in honor of Michigan Physics alumnus and honorary Doctor of Science, Ta-You Wu, one of the central figures of the 20th century in the Chinese and Taiwanese physics communities.
This is a hybrid lecture. Join us in person, or via livestream at: https://myumi.ch/MkzmE
2025 Ta-You Wu Lecture
in Physics
Gabriela González, Boyd Professor of Physics (Louisiana State University)
Einstein, Gravitational Waves, Black Holes and Other Matters
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.
Wednesday, October 8, 2025
4:00-5:00 PM
Location: Rackham Amphitheatre (4th Floor)
University of Michigan Ann Arbor Campus
Seating Begins at 3:30 PM!
This is a hybrid lecture. Join us in person for this lecture, or tune in via livestream at: https://myumi.ch/MkzmE
Prior to the lecture, there will be a reception in the West Atrium.
The reception will begin at 3:30 p.m.
Biography
Professor González research interest is in the detection of gravitational waves with interferometric detectors, such as the one in the LIGO Livingston Observatory, in Livingston, LA. She has published several papers on the specific predictions of Brownian motion as a limiting sources to the detectors' sensitivity. She was a founding member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, and has participated intensely in the commissioning of the LIGO detector at the Livingston Observatory since joining LSU in 2001, in issues related to alignment sensing and control. Her group is very involved in the instrumental characterization and calibration of the data collected in the data-taking Science Runs performed by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC). From 2000 to 2007, she co-led one of the four data analysis groups in the Collaboration, dedicated to the search of gravitational waves generated by binary systems of compact objects (neutron stars or black holes) in the final inspiraling stage before coalescence. In 2008-2011, she led the LSc detector characterization working group. In 2011, she was elected as the LSC spokesperson.
Location: Rackham Amphitheatre
University of Michigan Ann Arbor Campus
915 E. Washington Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
The Rackham Amphitheatre is located on the fourth floor of the Rackham Building. Doors to the fourth floor Rackham Amphitheatre will open at 3:30 pm for seating. Please come early as there will be no admittance after the lecture has started!
City Parking: Maynard Street Parking Structure
324 Maynard St, Ann Arbor, MI 48104
Walking Map from Maynard Street to Rackham Auditorium
Questions? Contact Carol Rabuck, crabuck@umich.edu
Previous Lectures in This Series
View an assortment of past Ta-You Wu lectures on YouTube.
- 2024 Hirosi Ooguri: Constraints on Quantum Gravity
- 2023 (Held in January, 2024) Jocelyn Bell Burnell: The Discovery of Pulsars
- 2022 Eiichiro Komatsu: Finding Cosmic Inflation
- 2021 Nobel laureate Klaus von Klitzing: A Nocturnal Discovery that Triggered a Revolution in International Metrology
- 2020 No lecture this year due to the Covid pandemic
- 2019 Nobel laureate Donna Strickland: Generating High-Intensity, Ultrashort Optical Pulses
- 2018 Nobel laureate F. Duncan Haldane: Topological Quantum Matter, Entanglement, and a "Second Quantum Revolution"
- 2017 Nobel laureate Kip S. Thorne: Exploring the Universe with Gravitational Waves: From the Big Bang to Black Holes
- 2016 David Spergel: Our Simple but Strange Universe
- 2015 Eric Betzig: Imaging Life at High Spatiotemporal Resolution
- 2014 Wendy Freedman: The Universe: Continuing Surprises
- 2014 Dennis Overbye: Confessions of a Dinosaur in the Age of New Media
- 2013 Nobel laureate David Wineland: Superposition, Entanglement, and Raising Schrödinger's Cat
- 2012 No lecture this year
- 2011 Gérard Mourou, Former Director of the Laboratoire d’ Optique Appliquée at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Technique Avancée & Professor at the Ecole Polytechnique (France): Laser-Based High Energy Physics
- 2010 Nobel laureate Samuel C. C. Ting: An Experiment to Explore the Mysteries of Space: The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on the International Space Station
- 2009 Helen Quinn: Wandering Planets, Falling Apples, Curving Spaces, Whirling Stars: How Unraveling the Mysteries of Gravity Has Taught Us About the Universe.
- 2008 Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek: The Universe is a Strange Place
- 2007 100th Birthday Celebration of the late Ta-You Wu: Distinguished Lecturer, Frank H. Shu, The Formation of Stars and Planetary Systems
- 2006 Nobel laureate Eric A. Cornell: Is Warm Glass More Sticky Than Cold Glass? Temperature and Casimir Force
- 2005 Nobel laureate Anthony J. Leggett: Does the Everyday World Really Obey Quantum Mechanics?
- 2004 Nobel laureate David J. Gross: Asymptotic Freedom and the Emergence of QCD (Or How I Won the Nobel Prize)
- 2003 Sir Martin Rees: Where is Cosmology Going?
- 2002 David Wilkinson (1935-2002): The Cosmic Microwave Backround Radiation
- 2001 Freeman Dyson: Is Life Analog or Digital?
- 2000 Nobel laureate Horst L. Stormer: Fractional Electronic Charges and other Tales from Flatland
- 1999 Nobel laureate Steven Chu: Seeing and Holding onto Atoms and Biological Molecules
- 1998 Benoit B. Mandelbrot (1924-2010): Fractals and Scale-Invariant Roughness in
the Sciences - 1997 Paul C. W. Chu: The Path of Zero Resistance
- 1996 Nobel laureate Pierre-Gilles de Gennes (1932-2007): Principles of Adhesion
- 1995 Nobel laureate T. D. Lee: Symmetry and Asymmetry
- 1994 Nobel laureate Joseph Taylor: Binary Pulsars and Relativistic Gravity
- 1993 Abraham Pais (1918-2000): George Uhlenbeck Remembered
- 1992 Nobel laureate C. N. Yang: Considerations on Carbon 60
