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April 8, 2023 past

Friedman Lecture - John Mather

100 Thomas

Friedman Lecture - John Mather

On Saturday April 8, the Astro Department is hosting a very unusual outreach visitor: Dr. John C. Mather, chief scientist of the James Webb Space Telescope and winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for cosmology. Dr. Mather will be our 2023 Friedman Lecturer in Astronomy speaking to the public and University communities on JWST. This is expected to be the Department's largest outreach event in years.

Breakfast will be held at 8:45-9:45AM in 114 McAllister. If you'd like to join for breakfast, please sign in here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IzpPAspJ0KgsKI_lPwzZk5_e2fXQWDTg05JVMmNGQpw/edit#gid=0

A few small groups of researchers or students can meet with Dr. Mather from 10-12:00PM in 432 Davey. If you are interested, please send an email by Monday, the 27th, with your attendees to Drs. Feigelson and McEntaffer.

Dr. Mather will give the public 2023 Friedman Lecture in Astronomy in 100 Thomas from 2:30-3:30pm. Please attend with friends and families.

Program

Date Time Speaker Title
2023-04-08 14:30 John Mather Friedman Lecture
About our wordmark
Monica Rincon Ramirez

The IGC wordmark was created by Monica Rincon Ramirez while she was a graduate student at the Institute. Monica enjoys drawing new connections between fundamental theory and observations. Her graduate work included general relativity, loop quantum gravity, and quantum fields in cosmological backgrounds; her thesis focused on effective quantum corrections to gravitational phenomena from spinfoams and applications to cosmology. She received her PhD in 2024.

The wordmark symbolizes the scope of research at the IGC. The base represents quantum gravity, evoking the quantum geometrical picture from spinfoams and loop quantum gravity — approaches studied at the Center for Fundamental Theory. The middle shows galaxies embedded in a smooth surface characteristic of spacetime in general relativity and the larger physical scales studied at the Center for Theoretical and Observational Cosmology. The top curves to an extreme representing a supermassive black hole accompanied by an energetic jet, with a binary black hole pair nearby — the high-energy phenomena studied at the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics.