Welcome to the World Year of Physics

1. Welcome to the World Year of Physics Fred Raab, LIGO Hanford Observatory

2. What is the “World Year” About? • Commemorates centennial of “annus mirabilis”, 1905, when Einstein launched a scientific revolution • UN Resolution cites the importance of physics to the health and quality of life of the citizens of the world • US adopts “World Year” theme of “Einstein in the 21st Century” • LIGO embodies this theme and was asked to develop a showcase activity -> Einstein@Home • At Hanford, we have more World Year activities each month this year! Raab: Welcome to the World Year

3. What Happened in 1905? • Einstein, age 26, working at Swiss Patent Office, published a series of papers that: • Laid the foundation for the quantum theory of light • Ended a millenia-old debate on whether atoms were real • Introduced a theory of space and time, called relativity • Discovered the equivalence of matter and energy, enshrined in the world’s most famous equation, E=mc2. • These papers launched a revolution that lead to most of 20th-century science and technology Raab: Welcome to the World Year

4. Effects of this revolution in our daily lives • We now understand: • The composition of matter, how chemicals bond together and how electricity flows in materials, so we can have modern pharmaceuticals, medical diagnostics, materials, computers, the internet • How to convert matter to energy, so we can understand the workings of the sun, how the chemical elements came about and how to forge new ones; we have nuclear power, nuclear weapons and the promise of nuclear fission energy sources • We have a theory of space and time that spans back towards the earliest moments of time and we understand how matter and energy warp space and time, so we can study our cosmic origins and, using the global positioning system, we can accurately navigate anywhere on earth to incredible accuracy Raab: Welcome to the World Year

5. What did Einstein do after 1905 • Perfected relativity. General Relativity in 1916 incorporated gravity as the effect of warping space and time. New field of cosmology begins. • Einstein continued work in quantum theory, predicting with Bose the existence of a new form of matter, called bosons • Einstein developed a distaste for Quantum Mechanics and spent the last 30 years of his life searching for a unified theory, where quantum mechanics and relativity would merge and the strange phenomena of quantum behavior would be explained and determinacy would be restored – a theory of everything from the subatomic to the edge of the universe and the beginning of time • Einstein died, April 16, 1955 at age 76 Raab: Welcome to the World Year

6. Einstein in the 21st Century • Gravitational waves • Space warps, caused by violent cataclysms, that travel at the speed of light • “Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony” known to exist but not directly detected as yet • LIGO and its cousins around the world will try to detect these for the first time and use them to study our universe where light cannot go; cornerstone for NASA and ESA missions in future decades • Searching for a “Theory of Everything” • 50 years after Einstein’s death, his reclusive search has become high fashion! More hidden dimensions? Multiple universes? ??? • Cosmology • How did we come to be? • What is the ultimate fate of our universe? Raab: Welcome to the World Year

7. Gravitational waves are ripples in space when it is stirred up by rapid motions of large concentrations of matter or energy Rendering of space stirred by two orbiting black holes: The Frontier of Relativity: Gravitational Waves Raab: Welcome to the World Year