Lecture and a Movie-Intersteller
Sunday, March 01 2026
https://www.manshiptheatre.org/comingsoon/science-on-screen-interstellar
In Earth's future, a global crop blight and second Dust Bowl are slowly rendering the planet uninhabitable. Professor Brand (Michael Caine), a brilliant NASA physicist, is working on plans to save mankind by transporting Earth's population to a new home via a wormhole. But first, Brand must send former NASA pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) and a team of researchers through the wormhole and across the galaxy to find out which of three planets could be mankind's new home.
About the Speaker
Dr. Brian O'Reilly is from Ireland where he did his undergraduate education, at Dublin City University in 1987, with a degree in Applied Physics. His Ph.D. is from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, obtained in 1995. He did his postdoctoral research at the University of Colorado, Boulder before joining LIGO in August 2002, just prior to the first data taking run for initial LIGO. He led the installation of the Advanced LIGO detector at the Livingston Observatory. This was a significant upgrade from the initial detector and lead almost immediately to the direct detection of gravitational waves emitted during the merger of two black holes. He served on the detection committee for the publication of this seminal first event, which marked the birth of a new field of gravitational wave astrophysics. Among his current efforts, he is the liaison between the U.S. based LIGO laboratory and the LIGO-India project. They intend to build a third LIGO observatory in India, which will come online in the early 2030s.
Contact the event organizers: Trisha Tunis