David Neilsen of Brigham Young University’s Department of Physics and Astronomy faculty will be presenting “Albert Einstein’s Legacy: Big Bang, Black Holes and Gravity Waves” on Tuesday, Sept. 1, in 1060 Harold B. Lee Library.
The presentation will be held in connection with the International Year of Astronomy. Seating begins at 7 p.m. and the lecture will begin at 7:30 p.m. A short question-and-answer session will follow. If weather permits, telescopes on top of the Eyering Science Center will also be open from 8:30 to 10 p.m. The public is welcome, and admission is free.
Black holes warp the space and time around them, and moving black holes send out waves like ripples on a pond, said Nielsen. “These gravitational waves carry interesting information about the black holes that created them, and how they were formed,” he said.
Neilsen will discuss efforts to detect gravitational waves on earth, and what we can learn from them about black holes, neutrons stars and the big bang.
He graduated from BYU with a bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics and received a doctorate in physics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1999. He worked at UT Austin and Louisiana State University before joining the BYU faculty in 2004.
For more information, contact David Neilsen at (801) 422-6078.
Writer: Brandon Garrett
