It took over a thousand physicists to build a telescope capable of detecting vibrations in space and time that come from the merger of two black holes. MIT's Rainer Weiss, one of the leaders of that team, and its inspiration and guide, will speak about their triumph in this year's John N. Bahcall lecture.
Dr. Weiss is a co-founder and intellectual spirit of the LIGO consortium of MIT and Caltech. LIGO successfully detected gravitational waves from colliding black holes, a marvelous achievement and demonstration of cooperative scientific and engineering ingenuity.
This program is part of the John N. Bahcall Lecture Series, which is organized and sponsored by the Space Telescope Science Institute and the Hubble Space Telescope Project/NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.