|
|
Physical Society Colloquium
Joseph Taylor
Princeton University
Joseph Taylor received his PhD in astronomy from Harvard University in 1967.
In 1968 he was appointed a professor of physics at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst. Since 1982 he has been at Princeton University,
where he is the James McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of
Physics. He served as Dean of the Faculty at Princeton from 1997 to 2003.
He has studied radio pulsars since shortly after their discovery in 1968,
pioneering the techniques used to discover, analyze, and time these objects.
In 1974 he and his student, Russell Hulse, discovered a pulsar in a tight
binary system. Through detailed followup studies on this pulsar over the
next 20 years, Taylor extracted several precision tests of Einstein's Theory
of General Relativity, including the only evidence to date of gravitational
waves, a key prediction of Einstein's theory. For this work, Hulse and
Taylor received the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Public Lecture
January 8th 2004, 20:00
Moyse Hall, Arts Building
Binary Pulsars and Relativistic Gravity
Pulsars are neutron stars - the extremely dense, strongly magnetized, rapidly
spinning remnants of supernova explosions. They also appear to be nature's
most precise clocks. Discovery of the first orbiting pulsar opened a new
subfield of radio astronomy, in which the relativistic nature of gravity is
tested through precise comparisons of "pulsar time" with atomic time on
Earth. Among other results, the experiments have demonstrated the existence
of gravitational waves, as predicted by Einstein's theory of gravity.
Scientific Lecture
January 9th 2004, 15:30
Room M1 Strathcona Building
Timing Binary Pulsars
Some pulsars exhibit long-term timing stability comparable with that of the
very best atomic clocks. This fact has made possible a variety of experiments
that probe the physics of neutron star interiors and the fundamental nature
of gravity. This talk will be a review of recent work in this area.
|