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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.

3 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. What would happen if Einstein was wrong? by jellomizer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:What would happen if Einstein was wrong? by Khashishi · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Absolutely! That would be a very exciting development indeed, if it were to happen.
      Consider the Michelson-Morley experiment. It _failed_ to detect the aether. And it is one of the most famous experiments in history.

  2. Re:A little more detail by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If Nobels could be awarded to dead people, the backlog of deserving winners (which becomes more apparent over time) would leave no room for contemporaries to win them.