Prof. Kip Thorne: Exploring the Universe with Gravitational Waves: LIGO and Beyond

The 11th annual Andrew Chamblin Memorial Lecture, entitled "Exploring the Universe with Gravitational Waves: LIGO and Beyond", was given by Professor Kip Thorne at 5pm on Tuesday 23rd May 2017 in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences, Wilberforce Road, Cambridge. Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of space and time predicted by Albert Einstein 100 years ago. After a half century effort, we humans have had our first contact them. LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) has detected and deciphered gravitational waves produced by pairs of colliding black holes a billion light years from Earth. Thorne will describe LIGO, its genesis and its discoveries, and the future of gravitational-wave astronomy: a future in which astronomers will probe a rich range of phenomena, including the birth of the universe and the birth of the fundamental forces of nature in our universe’s earliest moments.