Cascina meets Virgo
On Wednesday September 1st at 9 p.m., at the Banca di Pescia e Cascina, the panel Cascina incontra Virgo (Cascina meets Virgo) will be held, the last in the cycle of events Cascina Europa, organised by the Municipality of Cascina as part of the summer festival Metti una sera a Cascina. Viviana Fafone, Italian head of the Virgo Collaboration, and Stavros Katsanevas, director of the European Gravitational Observatory, will retrace the steps of the historic scientific enterprise of the Virgo experiment, one of the three largest and most sensitive gravitational wave detectors in the world, and of EGO, the European Gravitational Observatory. The event will be hosted by journalist Massimo Marini. Participation in the event, which will be held at the headquarters of the Banca di Pescia e Cascina, is free of charge. For info and bookings: prenotazioni@lacittadelteatro.it
Over the past twenty years, EGO and Virgo have built an increasingly close and significant relationship with the territory of the municipality of Cascina, which hosts them, a relationship that is manifested in events and projects of great scientific and cultural interest involving citizens, some of which will be illustrated during the meeting.
Among these, EGO leads the European project REINFORCE (in which the University of Pisa also participates), aimed at promoting citizen science, i.e. the active participation of non-scientists in frontier science, with the guidance of professional scientists. Ordinary citizens will thus be able to take part in the analysis of the data collected by Virgo and other European observatories and get to know the tools of gravitational astronomy first hand, thus actively contributing to it. The people of Cascina (and in particular the students of the University of the Free Age) will also be privileged partners in this project over the coming months.
Wednesday’s event is the first of two to be held this September, thanks to the collaboration between the European Gravitational Observatory and the Municipality of Cascina. To celebrate the year of Dante on the anniversary of the death of the great poet, on 18 September at 9 p.m. the headquarters of EGO, with the scenic backdrop of the large interferometer for gravitational waves Virgo, will host an event between art, science and entertainment, titled ‘E uscimmo a riveder le stelle’. Lina Bolzoni, Historian of Literature at the Scuola Normale di Pisa, and Stavros Katsanevas, director of EGO, will discuss the vision of the Cosmos in the Divine Comedy and contemporary science, with artistic and sound interludes, including a screening of Tomas Saraceno’s Cosmic Concert. The evening will be conducted by David Riondino. The full programme of the event will be published in the next few days on the web (www.ego-gw.it) and on EGO/Virgo’s social channels, Facebook (www.facebook.com/EGOVirgoCollaboration) and Twitter (www.twitter.com/ego_virgo).
