Nobel laureate to lecture at McGill
Princeton Professor Joseph H. Taylor to deliver Anna MacPherson lecture
Talk of pulsars will gravitate to McGill this week. Nobel Prize winner Joseph Taylor, who co-discovered the first binary pulsar, is visiting McGill to deliver the Anna I. MacPherson Lecture in Physics. Public and media are welcome to Taylor's free lecture, at 8 pm, on January 8, in Moyse Hall, Arts Building (853 Sherbrooke St. W).
During his talk, Taylor will describe his discovery of the binary pulsar. He will discuss the many precision tests of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity that his team has performed through observations of this pulsar over the next 20 years. He will also present the only evidence, to date, of gravitational waves - a key prediction of Einstein's theory.
The James McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Physics at Princeton University, Taylor won his Nobel Prize in 1993 with Russell Hulse. Both continue to explore problems in astrophysics and gravitational physics by means of radio-wavelength studies of pulsars. Among recent highlights are his discovery of many new pulsars, including millisecond and binary pulsars.
History and biography
Taylor earned a PhD in astronomy at Harvard University in 1968. He taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, from 1969 to 1981, until he joined Princeton University, where he became the James S. McDonnell professor of physics in 1986.
Taylor's prizewinning research on pulsars was conducted while he was a professor at Amherst (with Hulse as his graduate student). In 1974, using a large radio telescope in Puerto Rico, they discovered a pulsar emitting radio pulses, orbiting around a companion star, which they identified as a neutron star. Their discovery of the first binary pulsar, called PSR 1913 + 16, provided an unprecedented test of Albert Einstein's theory of gravitation, which, according to the general theory of relativity, predicts that objects accelerated in a strong gravitational field will emit radiation in the form of gravitational waves.
Taylor and Hulse timed PSR 1913 + 16's pulses over the next few years and showed that the two stars are indeed rotating ever faster around each other in an increasingly tight orbit, with an annual decrease of about 75 millionths of a second in their eight-hour orbital period. The rate at which the two stars are spiralling closer together was found to agree with the prediction of the Theory of General Relativity to an accuracy of better than 0.5 percent. This finding, reported in 1978, provided the first experimental evidence for the existence of gravitational waves and gave powerful support to Einstein's theory of gravity.
