Event Details 

Science Pop-Up Talks - Master of the Universe: How Einstein's Theories Overturned Our View of the Cosmos
ABSTRACT:  Albert Einstein’s greatest accomplishments, his special and general theories of relativity, opened the door to a new era of astronomy.  His
ideas revealed the source of a star’s power, led to the discovery of neutron stars and black holes, and allowed theorists to realize that that the
universe is expanding.  At the same time, his vision of space-time as a flexible mat indented by matter offered astronomers new tools to explore the
cosmos, via gravitational lensing and gravitational waves.  Just about anywhere astronomers’ observations take them today, they enter Einstein’s realm,
where time is relative, mass and energy are interchangeable, and space can stretch and warp. This lecture will show how modern cosmology was founded on the
blueprint that Einstein fashioned.
BIO:  Combining her undergraduate training in journalism with a master’s degree in physics, Marcia Bartusiak has been covering the fields of astronomy
and physics for four decades. A Professor of the Practice Emeritus in the Graduate Program in Science Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
she has written for a variety of publications--including Science, Smithsonian, Discover, National Geographic, Technology Review, and Astronomy--and reviews
science books for both The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. She is also the author of seven books, including "Einstein's Unfinished
Symphony," her award-winning history of gravitational-wave astronomy, "Black Hole," and "The Day We Found the Universe" on the birth of modern
cosmology, which won the Davis Prize of the History of Science Society.
In 1982, she was the first woman to win the American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award and five years later was a finalist in NASA‘s
Journalist-in-Space competition. She has also received the AIP Gemant Award, the Klumpke-Roberts Award of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, and in
2008 was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, cited for “exceptionally clear communication of the rich history,
the intricate nature, and the modern practice of astronomy to the public at large.”  She resides in Sudbury, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, with her
husband mathematician Stephen Lowe and their dog Hubble.