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Sugden Institute Oration with Professor Susan Scott
The Master/Head of College, Dr Stewart Gill OAM warmly invites you and your partner/guest to the next event in our Sugden Institute series. We are delighted to have Professor Susan Scott as our guest speaker.
Surfing gravitational waves to probe the dark side of the Universe
Professor Susan M Scott
Wednesday 20 March 2024
5:30pm arrival for 6pm oration followed by
drinks and canapés
Business attire
RSVP to Michele Mulder at rsvp@queens.unimelb.edu.au
Onsite parking is not available; Uber, taxi, trams recommended.
ORATION SYNOPSIS
In 1915 Albert Einstein produced his miraculous new theory of gravitation, general relativity. In the following years it would be well tested, but only in local regions of the Universe where gravity is weak. It passed all these tests, but it remained to be seen if it would still hold up, or break down, when tested in regions of the Universe where gravity is strong.
A few months after Einstein announced his new theory, he concluded that it predicted the existence of gravitational waves, an entirely new form of radiation, which is not part of the electromagnetic spectrum. He thought, however, that these waves would be too weak for us to ever detect them.
Following a century of technology evolution, and fundamental advances in our understanding of general relativity, and despite an ongoing groundswell of naysayers and disbelievers, in 2015 we achieved the remarkable first direct detection of gravitational waves on Earth.
This talk documents that journey. We will examine how well Einstein’s theory stands up under conditions of strong gravity, and we will see how we can surf gravitational waves to probe the dark side of the Universe.
Professor Susan Marjorie Scott FAA is an Australian mathematical physicist whose work concerns general relativity, gravitational singularities, and black holes. She is a Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Australian National University (ANU).
At ANU, she is the leader of the General Relativity Theory and Data Analysis Group, part of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration that has discovered gravity waves from collisions involving black holes and neutron stars, and is a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration Council. Scott studied mathematics and physics at Monash University and has a doctorate in mathematical physics from the University of Adelaide. She spent four years working with Roger Penrose at the University of Oxford and was a Rhodes Visiting Fellow at Somerville College, before joining the Australian National University faculty in 1998. She is a Chief Investigator for the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery.
Scott was elected fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 2016. In 2020, she was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society, and received the 2020 Dirac Medal of the University of New South Wales. In 2020, she was a joint winner of the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science. She received the Walter Burfitt Prize from the Royal Society of New South Wales and the Walter Boas Medal from the Australian Institute of Physics in 2022. She was awarded the Thomas Ranken Lyle Medal by the Australian Academy of Science in 2023.