Abstract:
About a year ago it was announced that gravitational waves have been detected on earth. What are Gravitational waves? How are they detected? How are they formed? What was actually seen? What created the detected waves? It is questions like these that this talk will address and answer.
Brief Bio:
Prof. William George Unruh is a Canadian physicist at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, who described the hypothetical Unruh effect in 1976. He obtained his B.Sc. from the University of Manitoba in 1967, followed by an M.A. (1969) and Ph.D. (1971) from Princeton University, New Jersey, under the direction of John Archibald Wheeler. Unruh has made seminal contributions to our understanding of gravity, black holes, cosmology, and quantum fields in curved spaces. He received Rutherford Memorial Medal (1982), Herzberg Medal (1983), Steacie Prize (1984), BC Science Council Gold Medal (1990), and Fellowship of American Physical Society and Royal Society of London (2001).