Nearly 100 years after General Relativity: Was Einstein right?
by
Michael Kramer(Max Planck Inst. for Radio Astronomy, Bonn)
→
Europe/Stockholm
FA31
FA31
Description
We are only a year away from celebrating the centenary of
Einstein's theory of general relativity (GR). Nearly a hundred years
later, efforts in testing GR and its concepts are still being made by
many colleagues around the world, using many different approaches. To
date GR has passed all experimental and observational tests with
flying colours, but in light of recent progress in observational
cosmology in particular, the question of as to whether alternative
theories of gravity need to be considered is as topical as ever.
While we are all very much looking forward to the first direct detection of
gravitational waves with ground-based (and, eventually, space-based)
detectors, it happens that nature provides us with an almost perfect
laboratory to test the strong-field regime - in the form of binary radio
pulsars. This talk will present some of the recent results in the tests of
general relativity and alternative theories of gravity and outlines what
we can expect in the future.