NOTE;
SPECIAL COLLOQUIUM. 1:00 P.M. IN THE BUILDING 8 AUDITORIUM
"Using Supercomputers to Collapse Gravitational Waves, Collide Black Holes (and study other Cataclysms)"
Einstein's equations of general relativity govern such exotic phenomena as black holes, neutron stars, and gravitational waves. Unfortunately they are among the most complex in physics, and require very large scale computational power --- which we are just on the verge of achieving --- to solve in the general case. I will motivate and describe the structure of these equations, and the worldwide effort to develop advanced computational tools to solve them in their full generality for the first time since they were written down nearly a century ago. I will focus on applications of these tools to extract new physics of relativistic systems. In particular, I will summarize recent progress in the study of black hole collisions, considered to be promising sources of observable gravitational waves that may soon be seen for the first time by the worldwide network of gravitational wave detectors (LIGO, VIRGO, GEO, and others) currently under construction.