Science Sundays: Clifford Will – Black Holes, Waves of Gravity, and other Warped Ideas of Dr. Einstein

Dr. Clifford Will

Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity has had a major impact on everything from popular culture to everyday life to basic science. Songs, plays and movies proclaim Einstein as the symbol of genius, while people navigating with GPS devices unknowingly take account of Einstein’s relativistic warpage of time. Two of the crazier ideas that come from Einstein are Gravitational Waves and the Black Hole, which manifest the warpage of space. Today, at the 100^th anniversary of his theory, international teams of scientists have embarked on a quest to verify these ideas. Building and operating large-scale detectors on the ground, and designing space-based detectors for the future, they hope to detect and measure the waves, and to use those wave signals to reveal the hidden secrets of black holes.

Clifford Will is Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Florida.