Interstellar
Featuring LIGO Lead Scientist Dr. Brian O’Reilly
Science on Screen
Hidden Figures
Featuring NASA Chief Engineer, Dr. K. Renee Horton
PRESENTED BY SCIENCE ON SCREEN AND FILMS AT MANSHIP
Date: Sunday, March 1, 2026, 7:00 p.m.
Ticket Price: $10, including fees
Rating: PG-13
Length: 3 Hours
About the Science on Screen Series
Science on Screen® creatively pairs film with lively introduction lessons by notable figures from the world of science, technology, and medicine. An Initiative of the Coolidge Corner Theatre with major support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
About the Film
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.
About LIGO Livingston
The U.S. National Science Foundation Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (NSF LIGO), was designed to open the field of gravitational-wave astrophysics through the direct detection of gravitational waves predicted by Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. LIGO's multi-kilometer-scale gravitational wave detectors use laser interferometry to measure the minute ripples in space-time caused by passing gravitational waves from cataclysmic cosmic events such as colliding neutron stars or black holes, or by supernovae. NSF LIGO comprises two widely-separated interferometers within the United States—one in Hanford, Washington and the other in Livingston, Louisiana—operated in unison to detect gravitational waves.
On September 14, 2015, the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded LIGO made the first-ever direct observation of gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of space and time predicted by Albert Einstein 100 years earlier. In 2017, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three key players in the development and ultimate success of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO).
Trailer
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