UA Celebrates 100th Anniversary of Einstein Theory with Lectures

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — The University of Alabama will celebrate the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s theory of general relativity with two lectures about Einstein’s work by distinguished scientists.

The first lecture, “The Formulation of General Relativity,” will be presented by Dr. Robert Wald, the Charles A. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Physics at the University of Chicago, Tuesday, Oct. 27 at 7 p.m. in room 38 of Lloyd Hall.

The second lecture, “Black Hole Horizons,” will be presented by Dr. Heino Falcke, a professor of astroparticle physics and radio astronomy at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, Thursday, Nov. 5 at 7 p.m. in room 38 of Lloyd Hall.

Both lectures are sponsored by UA’s College of Arts and Sciences and the department of physics and astronomy. They are free and open to the public.

Wald will discuss three major ingredients underlying general relativity—special relativity, which says that space and time comprise a single entity; the equivalence principle, which says that all bodies fall the same way in a gravitational field; and the equation that relates the curvature of spacetime to the matter content in the universe.

Falcke will discuss black holes, which were discovered as solutions of Einstein’s equations a century ago, and their relationship to general relativity.

Wald is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Physical Society, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of numerous papers on topics in general relativity, cosmology, and quantum phenomena related to gravity.

He also has authored two books related to gravity, “General Relativity” and “Quantum Fields in Curved Spacetime and Black Hole Thermodynamics,” as well as a popular book “Space, Time, and Gravity: the Theory of the Big Bang and Black Holes.”

Falcke is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2011, he was awarded the Spinoza Prize, the top science award in the Netherlands. In 2000, he received the Ludwig Biermann Award, the German Astronomical Society award for outstanding young astronomers.

In 2013, the BlackHoleCam team he co-founded received a €14 million (approximately $19.3 million in 2013) grant from the European Research Council.

The department of physics and astronomy is part of UA’s College of Arts and Sciences, the University’s largest division and the largest liberal arts college in the state. Students from the College have won numerous national awards including Rhodes Scholarships and Goldwater Scholarships.