Timeline of Key Events
1962
The UT Center for Relativity is established.
1967
Professors Rainer Sachs and Arthur Wolfe co-authored the paper on the Sachs-Wolfe effect
1970
George Sudarshan becomes director of the UT Center for Particle Physics a year after joining the faculty.
1973
Bryce S. DeWitt and Cécile Morette DeWitt arrive and begin serving as faculty members at UT.
1976
John Archibald Wheeler joins the UT faculty, directs its Center for Theoretical Physics.
1982
Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg arrives at UT and establishes the Weinberg Theory Group.
1989
Polchinski, Dai and Leigh (all at UT) discover D-branes: New Connections Between String Theories, Mod.Phys.Lett.A 4 (1989) 2073-2083.
1990
Candelas (UT), de la Ossa (UT), Green (Maryland) and Parkes (UT) discover Mirror Symmetry: A pair of Calabi–Yau manifolds as an exactly soluble superconformal field theory Nuclear Physics B. 359 (1): 21–74.
1997
Banks (Rutgers), Fischler (UT), Shenker (Rutgers) and Susskind (Stanford) create the Matrix Theory formulation of M-Theory: M theory as a matrix model: A Conjecture
Phys.Rev.D 55 (1997) 5112-5128.
2016
LIGO director and UT Austin alumnus David Reitze announces the first-ever detection of gravitational waves, work that current faculty members Hsin-Yu Chen, Pablo Laguna, Deirdre Shoemaker, and Aaron Zimmerman also contribute to.
2017 & 2020
Nobel Prizes are awarded to Kip Thorne and Roger Penrose respectively years after each scientist had collaborated closely with UT physicists on related work.
2019
Katherine Freese joins the UT faculty and leads new cosmology efforts in the Physics Department together with Assistant Professors Kimberly Boddy and Nick Galitzki.
2019
Andreas Karch is awarded a Simons Collaboration in Mathematical and Physical Sciences on "Ultra Quantum Matter.”
2020
The Center for Gravitational Physics (CGP) is founded within the College of Natural Sciences. The mission of the Center to unravel the mystery of strong-field gravity as it plays out in the universe.
2020
Katherine Freese is elected to membership in the National Academy of Science.
2021
The world mourns the loss of one of the world’s greatest scientists with the passing of Steve Weinberg.
2022
2022
The University of Texas at Austin hosts its first event in conjunction with the establishment of its new Weinberg Institute for Theoretical Physics, hosting guest lecturer and Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek for the first Weinberg Memorial Lecture.
The Weinberg Institute hosted the inaugural Theoretical Astroparticle and Cosmology Symposium.
2023
The Weinberg Institute joins the Simons Observatory, an experiment located in Chile that will make detailed observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background, the light left over from the hot early Universe.
The NANOGrav collaboration announces the first evidence of a stochastic gravitational wave background, detected at nanoHertz frequencies. As part of the collaboration, Kimberly Boddy contributed to searches for new physics.
2024
Katherine Freese wins Cozarelli Prize from the National Academy of Sciences.
The Weinberg Institute for Theoretical Physics hosts guest lecturer and Nobel Laureate James Peebles for the second Weinberg Memorial Lecture.