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The 2017 Nobel Prize For Physics Goes To Three Scientists Who Proved Einstein Right (fastcompany.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: The three physicists, Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Barry Barish, won the coveted prize for the detection of gravitational waves -- the ripples in the fabric of spacetime that were first predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago. Weiss, Thorne, and Barish made the discovery as part of the LIGO/VIRGO Collaboration back in February 2016. It was then that they had recorded gravitational waves coming from the collision of two massive black holes a billion light-years away.
Barry Barish; please tell me his middle name is Barney and he is a part time barista on Barry Island.
That's not even possible. The earth has only existed for 6,000 years.
Kip Thorne has done a lot of impressive work, not just on LIGO. In this context though, Thorne, Weiss, and Ronald Drever (who died last year and thus wasn't eligible for the Nobel), proposed a detector of this type in the 1980s. Barry Barish got the prize as the LIGO director.
Since the initial work with LIGO, similar apparatuses are also coming online, including Virgo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgo_interferometer . There's also a proposal to set up a similar system in India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Initiative_in_Gravitational-wave_Observations. Having multiple detectors will have a whole host of benefits: this type of system has trouble detecting waves that come from certain angles so having multiple separate detectors will help cover those angles. Also, since we can measure the exact time difference from when a given wave hits the detectors we can use that to pinpoint the location much more narrowly. Along with neutrino telescopes, this sort of system is pretty much one of only two ways we can get information about far away stellar objects that isn't simply from the electromagnetic spectrum.
In terms of Nobel prizes per a capita the US isn't even in the top 10 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/maps-and-graphics/countries-nobel-prize-winners-per-capita/. It is a combination of the high US population and a somewhat high per a capita that has this impact. Note by the way that this data does have a few which are a bit silly since a single Nobel for a very tiny country immediately pushes it to the top of the list, but Israel, Germany, the Netherlands, and others are all on the list without relying on really tiny populations. The situation is similar with the Fields Medal (which is roughly the equivalent of the Nobel for math) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_Fields_Medallists where the US per a capita is well above average but not at all the highest, and it is the large US population which then puts it in the top. Note by the way, that this data is approximate: a lot of people (especially the US ones) are immigrants from other countries or have dual citizenship, so these sorts of numbers are necessarily approximations. The really striking thing though is that China and India have very large populations with surprisingly few such prizes; similarly, one way of seeing how much trouble Russia was having scientifically during the Cold War was how few per a capita Nobels and Fields Medals they had (although to some extent this may have also been connected to political issues).
And like Evolution, Gravity is nothing but a THEORY!!
We all KNOW it's really Jesus that keeps us from floating off of God's Green Earth!
So, this called 'science' is nothing but Liberal propaganda trying to promote Socialism and anti-gun legislation!
A Nobel prize for Kip Thorne has been a long time coming, he's been near the top in Physics for as long as I can remember.
Well done sir, to you and your collegues!
Thorne was profiled in one episode of a 1992 (?) six-part series on PBS called "The Astronomers", as was a Moscow-based colleague, whose name escapes me - both in the area of cosmology. While many astronomers used large-scale equipment to do their work, Thorne et al basically needed a pad of paper and a pencil. The Astronomers still one of the best series on the subject.
These guys were a lock for the prize as soon as their paper was published. The only question was in which year would it be awarded. Awesome work.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
LIGO is an interesting experiment with 2 main parts
1) A really good apparatus for measuring forces acting on a mass
2) A process for eliminating most of what the apparatus detects as normal background stuff
An interesting question is, "Is the residual false alarm rate acceptable?"
With random noise it seems that there are some odds that eventually a false positive will get through filter process.
Adding more sensors should lower this probability greatly, but not lower the probability of a real gravity wave getting through much.
So as a cross check, as they add more sensors, is the detection rate going down?
Or if you go back and post process the data with subsets of the sensors, does it go up?
Lets hope not. I like the idea of confirming our meager understand of the Universe.
Building LIGO wasn't just the effort of these three. No doubt hundreds of very talented engineers participated in the design and building of LIGO not to mention the many, many bureaucrats that, although often vilified, made this possible by manipulating the levers of government and other institutions.
I hope they receive some recognition also.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Would they still win the award if Einstein was wrong, and their experiments disproved it?
There is a lot of Real science that goes on, and the final results are no results, no correlation found.... Not finding something that is considered true, is just as valuable.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Is there any similar map with the junk Nobels filtered out?
Ezekiel 23:20
Okay, I realize the prize isn't supposed to be made posthumously, but - the Nobel committee should have additionally named Albert Einstein and Honorary Living Person for the day and then added him to the list.
Sure, he's already won it before... but, it's been a century and we keep getting reminders just how amazing the guy was.
#DeleteChrome
Exactly! Intelligible wouldn't match his style. He rambled on incoherently in front of thousands of Boy Scouts about some crazy night in a hotel bar. He gives sobriety a bad name.
Table-ized A.I.
It's more a commentary on how the Nobel Prizes could be doing more to help developing countries instead of just giving the awards out to people from jerk countries who are already plenty wealthy.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Which ones do you consider junk? The most obvious one would be economics, although that is not actually a Nobel, although it is awarded with them. Is literature junk?
The Nobel prize in physics has been awarded to white men, brown men, yellow men. It has been awarded to males and females. It has been awarded to atheists, christians, jews and muslisms.
You cannot criticise the Nobel for not being diverse enough. Of course the one thing that people like you don't get is that the Nobel is an award for the best of the best. Chandrasekhar was indian, and india is a country that epitomizes wealth disparity and segregation through the caste system (still a third world shithole in 2017). Yet he was awarded the Nobel prize because he made some fundamental discoveries.
> It's more a commentary about how user DNS-and-BIND could be doing more to help developing countries instead of just whining on slashdot that someone else isn't doing so.
Is that map color-coded by Nobels-per-capita, or by distance from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences building? Funny old world.
The really striking thing though is that China and India have very large populations with surprisingly few such prizes
They are quite far from Sweden.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It's in the rest mass.
Well, Chemistry and some other stuff too, but not really, the Nobel commission didn't want to talk about that other stuff.
They are quite far from Sweden.
Not as far, on average, as the United States.
Stockholm is closer to Beijing than to Chicago, and closer to Guangzhou than to Dallas.
I take your point, but Israel (at 1 New York City population) and the Netherlands (at 2 New York Cities) definitely do have comparatively tiny populations. At least Germany hits a full quarter of US population.
Let's see if we can keep the Nobel for what it is intended, and try to not turn it into a political football.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Can probably count a good number of the Nobel Piece Prizes in the junk category. Unless you're the type that believes a politician deserves one merely for being elected.
Can probably count a good number of the Nobel Piece Prizes in the junk category. Unless you're the type that believes a politician deserves one merely for being elected.
Try to keep up, conservatives are crying about Hillary Clinton now.
Despite sharing the name Nobel, the organization that gives the "Peace" prizes out is separate from the one that awards the scientific / mathematical prizes.
That's like saying, "If you are going to do an impression of Keith Richards, at least enunciate clearly."
Einstein was a fraud and a plagiarist, so please give credit where due...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_Fields_Medallists
Japan has 3 winners.
China has 1 (maybe 3 if you count Terence Tao and Ngo Bao Chau).
China has 10x the population of Japan.
Given that China has traditionally been the source of innovation in asia, I think we can safely conclude being a puppet of the west has elevated the ingenuity of the Japanese by a factor of at least 10X.
The question now is when will I receive my Fields medal for this great stroke of insight?
It does my heart good to see Kip Thorne share in this prize. I love it when good things happen to good people.
My work takes me into science classrooms, and I meet a lot of science teachers. In the course of a discussion about letting bright kids really stretch their capabilities, an elementary school teacher in a small Ontario town told me he tried to contact Thorne for information wormholes and time travel.
Thorne responded with an email 'way beyond the teachers wildest dreams. The student was pleased to get a world-class answer to his questions. The teacher, though, had written a guy he knew is one of the top physicists on Earth (and a very busy man) with no great hope of a reply. He almost teared up telling me about Thorne's response, and how important it was that the guy with his name on heavy-duty science books (present in class, though beyond any of the kids) took time to answer the questions of a 10-year-old kid.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
For showing up that Al Gore fellow :(
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
Trump will fix this - imprison all science commies Mr. President! MAGA!
Ngo Bao Chau is vietnamese, and Terence Tao was born in Australia.
And what will you say about France, by far the country with the largest number of Fields medal per capita?
(Actually Grothendieck and Werner are counted as both German and French, but they both came to France before they were 11 and 9 years old).
India banned caste discrimination in its constitution when it left the British Commonwealth. Since then, the dismantling of the caste system has progressed, thanks to various laws, quotas, and education initiatives. Some vestiges of caste identity remain, but saying India now has a "caste system" is just plain wrong.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
So you are bolstering my observation that being a west sock puppet boosted Japanese ingenuity by 30X?
Well, they'd have gotten the Nobel earlier if they proved Einstein wrong.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
But Keith Richards sounds clear if you are stoned.
Actually, we don't know what gravity really is, we only know it exists (here) as a force of some kind. There are lots of theories about the underlying mechanism, but none have solid empirical backing so far. More specifically, gravity's existence is a fact, but not its mechanism/cause.
Table-ized A.I.