Innovation... July 7, 2017 Hour 1
Neutrino Day with SDPB's Cara Hetland begins at the 4850 Level in Davis Cavern. She kicks things off with Michael Landry, the event's keynote speaker and Observatory Head for LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) Hanford in Washington. In the first half of the conversation, he describes where gravitational waves come from and how the LIGO project was built to detect them.
In the second half, Michael teaches us why we should care about gravitational waves and he revisits the day when the waves were first detected. This was crucial for understanding the universe's history, as the discovery reflected a 1.3 billion-year-old merging of black holes. We also learn what this means for the future.
Chicago-based playwright/screenwriter Penny Penniston is quite popular among science festivals for her play Now Then Again. She takes a scientific concept of a wave traveling forward and backward in time and turns it into a physicist love story about life choices.
