Professor Charles Misner and Gravity

Professor Emeritus Charles Misner, long an expert in the study of gravity, spent a week in 2017 at the University of Cambridge as an invited participant in the celebration of Stephen Hawking's 75th birthday.  Prof. Misner's daughter Benedicte, who has known Stephen and Jane Hawking since she was a school girl near their home 50 years ago, joined in the festivities.

At a conference called Gravity2017 at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Prof. Misner gave two short invited talks.  One was mostly on the early history as the black hole concept was beginning to gel, and one was on the question of what the Einstein equations might believably tell us about spacetime inside black holes.

The third project was writing (with Kip Thorne) an introduction to the forthcoming republication of their 1973 textbook, Gravitation.  After a long life, unrevised but always in print, this classic work was dropped by a publisher who had acquired it after many publishing mergers and acquisitions and mistakenly only advertised it in their Chemistry catalog.  Princeton University Press then obtained rights to the book (popularly called “MTW”, after its authors Misner, Thorne and John Archibald Wheeler) and will reprint it as a $60 cloth bound volume on October 24.

Prof. Misner was also quoted in Nature on the 2017 Nobel Prize announcement.  His student Richard Isaacson (Ph.D., 1967), was noted as an "unsung hero" of LIGO, along with Joe Weber and Alessandra Buonanno, in a separate article in Nature.

CMNS has posted video from the UMD Gravitational Waves event on November 1, 2016.

The American Institute of Physics has interviewed Misner for its oral history collection:

https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/33697

https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/46734

 

Misner and his wife Susanne donated correspondence from Stephen Hawking to endow the Weber Fund: https://umdphysics.umd.edu/about-us/news/department-news/1463-letters-from-a-science-giant.html

Gravitational Waves Detected a Fourth Time

On August 14, 2017, at 10:30:43 UTC, scientists observed gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of spacetime—for the fourth time.

The twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors—located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington—detected the gravitational wave event, named GW170814.

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Turning Ions into Quantum Cats

In Schrödinger's famous thought experiment, a cat seems to be both dead and alive—an idea that strains credulity. These days, cats still don't act this way, but physicists now regularly create analogues of Schrödinger's cat in the lab by smearing the microscopic quantum world over longer and longer distances.

johnson scstate ncomm 2017 4An ion (purple) sits in the center of an ion trap. Ultrafast laser pulses create a "cat state" by pushing apart the ion's internal quantum states (red and blue). (Credit: E. Edwards/JQI)

 

 http://jqi.umd.edu/news/turning-ions-into-quantum-cats 

Sensing Atoms Caught in Ripples of Light

Optical fibers are ubiquitous, carrying light wherever it is needed. These glass tunnels are the high-speed railway of information transit, moving data at incredible speeds over tremendous distances.  

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