Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The 2017 Nobel Prize For Physics Goes To Three Scientists Who Proved Einstein Right (fastcompany.com)

Posted by msmash on from the recognition-time dept.

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.

6 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. A little more detail by JoshuaZ · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:A little more detail by JoshuaZ · · Score: 4, Informative

      While Morley and Michelson did make inteferometers, what they were using to measure was very different than gravitational waves, and relied on a degree of sensitivity many orders of magnitude lower (hence for example they didn't use lasers (which of course they couldn't because they weren't invented yet)). Many aspects of LIGO are so different than a classical inteferometer that it really should be regarded for most purposes as a different type of instrument completely.

    2. Re:A little more detail by JoshuaZ · · Score: 4, Informative

      It dates to the 1970s when they firmed up a lot of the rules (including that it could only go to at most three people). Prior to that, it had gone to someone who had very recently died. The thought process isn't completely clear. It appears that since the original bequest stated that the reward should go to work in the previous year (although it very often in practice does not), that if the person was dead, then they had obviously not done recent enough work. Another thought process seems to be that if it is in part to promote further work, then giving it to a dead person doesn't make sense.

  2. Re:Another Nobel, another American by JoshuaZ · · Score: 5, Informative

    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).

  3. 2017 Nobel Prize For Physics by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:What would happen if Einstein was wrong? by JoshuaZ · · Score: 3, Informative

    Yes, completely. If we had failed to detect gravitational waves it would be an incredibly big deal. Right now, we're trying to understand how to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity. If LIGO had not detected gravitational waves that would be a major sign of what to do, and would also help us see a large-scale area where GR breaks down (right now, QM works very well on a small scale and GR works very well on a large scale). Some people actively expressed disappointment that LIGO not only detected the waves but detected waves that matched the predictions of GR nearly perfectly.