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.

Comments

Barry Barish

[Anonymous Coward]

Barry Barish; please tell me his middle name is Barney and he is a part time barista on Barry Island.

A billion light years

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not even possible. The earth has only existed for 6,000 years.

Re:A billion light years

[Anonymous Coward]

It's time to sue the Nobel committee for infringing on our deepest held beliefs that the earth is 6000 years old and that gravity is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese to destroy American manufacturing.

Re:A billion light years

[Anonymous Coward]

I realize you're trying to be funny, but what your describing is still possible.

The summary is only saying that the two black holes existed a billion years ago. It's not saying earth existed a billion years ago.

Re:A billion light years

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you an idiot? Clearly god also created those gravitational waves in an already-travelled-999,994,000-light-years state

Re:A billion light years

[Anonymous Coward]

And flat too!

Re:A billion light years

[K. S. Kyosuke]

They are light years. They contain much less time by volume than your regular years.

Re:A billion light years

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course its possible.

If Adam and Eve could be created as fully formed adults, there is no reason at all that an omnipotent God could not have created a universe that was fully formed, and otherwise had an appearance that we would only *OTHERWISE* associate with the passage of time. Suggesting that the earth has been around for billions of years simply because it appears billions of years old is no different than suggesting that Adam, moments after his creation, had actually existed for however many years he appeared to be. It's not actually deceptive on the part of God to do this, because the apparent discrepancy is actually caused by human projections of what those who would doubt it believe they should reasonably expect, not by anything that God actually did.

Re: A billion light years

[tysonedwards]

Here I thought that gravity was a construct of the surface of the earth traveling strait up at 1g of acceleration.

Re:A billion light years

[sysrammer]

Yep. As many cultures around the world has noticed, God is a Jokester.

Re:A billion light years

[Anonymous Coward]

All Biblical time measurements are Lorenz contracted due to the speed of the goddam lambs that get lost in the desert. Everybody knows that.

Re:A billion light years

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it is humans that are playing the joke on themselves... All God did was make it. As I said, when he made Adam & Eve, they were adults too... if one of us were to travel back in time to personally witness Adam's creation, even after seeing it with one's own eyes, there would be absolutely no experiment that could be done upon Adam which would tell you that he had not actually existed for 18 to 25 years, or however old Adam actually appeared to be, despite having only just been brought into existence immediately prior. The only evidence that he had just been created would be that you had witnessed it, and possibly even recorded it, if you brought suitable recording equipment with you. In lack of any other evidence, the extreme skeptic might even be inclined to doubt they ever even saw what they did... attributing it to a hallucination or maybe even a deliberate deception and manipulation of their ability to perceive reality and record it, as you might suggest God is doing now by making everything look older than it actually is, but such attributions are really just our own doing, and not a reflection upon what God may have necessarily intended.

Of course, at that point, it might seem a whole lot simpler to just exclude God from the equation entirely... but I'd suggest that's a lot like excluding the number 1 from mathematics.

Re:A billion light years

[Streetlight]

None of this really matters because the earth will begin to end, IIRC, Oct. 21, 2017, according to the guy who predicted it would end late last month because some planet would appear and vaporize us. He re-ran the numbers and came up with a new date. It's all in the bible, an infallible scientific set of documents.

Re:A billion light years

[TimSSG]

I think weight would be better than volume in the joke.

They are light years. They contain much less time by volume than your regular years.

Re:A billion light years

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I guess that depends on how beer strength is measured in your country.

Re:A billion light years

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really. There are no proofs of intelligence in Universe creation.

A little more detail

[JoshuaZ]

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.

Re:A little more detail

[bugs2squash]

I thought Morley and Michelson invented it

Re:A little more detail

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you know the reasoning behind the rule against posthumous nobel prize awards? If someone did the work, shouldn't they be recognized even after they've died?

Re:A little more detail

[JoshuaZ]

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.

Re:A little more detail

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

I think it is closer to a Genius Grant in that respect. Guy is dead so he won't be doing any more work.

Re:A little more detail

[JoshuaZ]

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.

Re:A little more detail

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you know the reasoning behind the rule against posthumous nobel prize awards? If someone did the work, shouldn't they be recognized even after they've died?

There are other physics prizes that don't have the limitation that the Nobel one has. And it's not peculiar to physics either, what about the Fields medal in mathematics ? Age limit is 40 years old. Make the greatest mathematical discovery at age 60 and nope you will not get the Fields medal. You'll get a host of other distinguished mathematical prizes but not the Fields. It's just the way it is. Accept and move on.

Re:A little more detail

[jellomizer]

I expect there are a few reasons.
1. The reward money and prestige should be used towards further investment into the area they have won.
2. International legal issues of who would be the next of kin(s), In some countries Say a noble peace prize goes to someone who fought against the evil rule of his older brother. If he had died, the Evil older brother may be the one who got the Nobel Prize award, thus funding the Evil they were rewarding trying to stop.
3. How far should you go back. They were a lot of important discoveries and actions that happened a hundred years ago, that never got a prize. Should current people be forced to be judged against everyone in the past?
4. It isn't a lifetime achievement award. This reward is actually for a particular thing, not an overall how you lived your life.

Re:A little more detail

[Anonymous Coward]

They were working to measure the speed of the Earth through the ether/aether.

They found no movement. Earth is flat and stationary!

18 years later, Einstein decided light moved the same speed in all contexts, and the earth was round again! Plus, space curved and time fluctuates! hooray for religion!

Re:A little more detail

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Maybe you should question the Fields Medal rules first?

Re:A little more detail

[lgw]

It's fundamentally the same measurement: is the speed of light the same in all directions, over time? Now we understand that there's no difference between detecting a change in distance and a change in the speed of light, but the instrument doesn't need to understand that. So, really, what's the difference in the instruments beyond sensitivity?

Heck, the difference between GR and the aether is itself fairly subtle: turns out the aether moves along with massive objects, but substitute "flow of aether" for "curvature of spacetime" and you can make a valid subset of GR.* The difference in kind is that we now understand that time is imaginary distance (or whatever way you state the T^2 - X^2 signature of Minkowski space), so the speed of light and measurement of distance and time can't be disentangled.

[*] There are a bunch of fun theories that are just re-statements of relativity with more complex math. But I'm not sure it's possible to have math more complex than GR, so in this case it's merely colorful.

Re:A little more detail

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:A little more detail

[habig]

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.

A bit more context - Barish was more than merely a director. While the idea was certainly Thorne and Weiss, Barish was the guy who came in and made the whole project actually work.

As with most modern science, hundreds of scientists and engineers have worked over decades to get the result being celebrated. But if you have to pick three, this is a good choice. Note that while the Nobels are constrained to three people, the Breakthrough Prize is not: it was awarded to the whole collaboration last year.

Re: A little more detail

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that why all mathematicians I know under35 are speed/adderall junkies?

Re:A little more detail

[habig]

Also note: 1/2 the prize went to Weiss (Idea and a lot of the implementation), and the other half to Thorne (idea) and Barish (rest of implementation). So if you've got to boil a big thing down really simply (and the Nobel people do), that's how they did it.

Re:A little more detail

[budgenator]

Still it seems awkward to award a prize to someone for supplying supporting evidence to support a theory, where the actual theory didn't rate the prize.

Re:A little more detail

[coastwalker]

One should note that Kip Thorne also collaborated on one of the greatest physics books ever written. It should be up there with Darwins "On The Origin of Species". To quote wikipedia - Gravitation is a physics book on Einstein's theory of gravity, written by Charles W. Misner, Kip S. Thorne, and John Archibald Wheeler and originally published by W. H. Freeman and Company in 1973. Owing to its prominence, it is frequently abbreviated MTW after its authors' initials. The book, which has more than 1200 pages, resembles a large telephone book in size and shape. The cover illustration, drawn by Kenneth Gwin, is a line drawing of an apple with cuts in the skin to show geodesics. It contains 10 parts and 44 chapters, each beginning with a quotation. The bibliography has a long list of original sources and other notable books in the field. The level of the book is advanced, with the intended audience at the graduate-level and above. It is however a work of art and if you are into physics it is well worth reading the chapter introductions if nothing else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:A little more detail

[Anonymous Coward]

MM had an accuracy of 10^-9

LIGO has an accuracy of 10^-21

The ratio of a spoon of sugar to the human genome is 10^-12.

So if MM built a device that measured the human weight up to a few grams, LIGO built a device that measured it down to the presence or absence of a few large molecules.

In some sense yes, you are measuring the same fundamental thing. But more relevantly, there is clearly a qualitative difference between the two.

Re:A little more detail

[ClickOnThis]

I realize that you're re-introducing the aether as a "fun theory" and that's fine. However, one of the overwhelming conclusions from the Michelson-Morley experiment is that the aether does not exist because if it did, we would be able to measure the earth's movement in relation to it. The need for "more complex math" to rescue the aether is a sign that we should set it aside because of Occam's Razor.

That's not to say that one theory is "right" and the other is "wrong" -- they're both "right" if they agree with observations. For example, the Copernican and Ptolemaic models of the solar system can both predict the future location of planets, so they're both "right". But we prefer Copernicus because it is simpler, i.e., it requires fewer presumptions.

As far as the existence of math that is more complex than GR, there most certainly is. Learning GR is challenging, but not outrageously so. Many physics students take their first GR courses in late undergrad or early grad school.

Re:A little more detail

[Anonymous Coward]

Another way of looking at it is that Michelson-Morley assumed the Earth moves. Perhaps that is the part that was wrong.

Re:A little more detail

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh?

Re:A little more detail

[ChrisMaple]

Over time, additional reasons have been discovered for preferring the Copernican system. The primary one is that the Copernican model agrees with the law of gravity, which the Ptolemaic cannot be made to do. In concert with the law of gravity, the Copernican system also has predictive power.

Re:A little more detail

[ClickOnThis]

Newton's law of gravitation provides the gravitational force between two bodies as a function of the distance between them. Therefore, it is independent of the co-ordinate system in which the bodies are observed, because the distance doesn't change in those systems.

Newton's laws of motion are stated canonically for an inertial frame of reference. They can still work in non-inertial frames, provided one introduces pseudo-forces to account for the effects of such frames.

So, both the Copernican and Ptolemaic models can be shown to be compatible with Newton's laws of gravitation and motion. However... the Copernican model assumes the Sun is motionless. Since the Sun is a good approximation to the centre of mass of the Solar System, the Copernican model views the Solar System in a near-inertial frame, so the equations of motion expressed with Newton's laws are far simpler. The Ptolemaic model, on the other hand, requires the introduction of awkward-looking pseudo-forces in order to accommodate the non-inertial character of the Earth's reference frame.

Re:A little more detail

[JoshuaZ]

I agree that the measurement itself is fundamentally the same, but to get to this level of sensitivity required massive innovations, many clever tricks, and extremely precise optics. It is obviously a continuation of the line of thinking of M&M, but that's in the same way say the Saturn V is a continuation of the line of thinking as the V-2 or the Redstone.

Re:A little more detail

[lgw]

I like the way the Saturn V is the height of rocketry in your example. Not sure I disagree, mind you, until SpaceX makes re-use routine.

Re:A little more detail

[lgw]

Aether the way it was understood in M&M's day clearly does not exist, but that being said it remains not at all clear how light propagates (or perhaps it's one of those annoying "why" questions). But we are back to light being a wave (along with everything else, which I find mind-bending).

What makes a good model? If you work with it day-to-day to solve problems: simplicity of (accurate) computation. But if you don't have those concerns, there's nothing wrong with preferring one for its aesthetic qualities. There's an infinity of theories that accurately describe any data set, after all, and I'll choose the one that I find the most entertaining on any given day.

Of course, you're free to prefer the one you like as well.

Re:A little more detail

[JoshuaZ]

I actually originally had written it with the Falcon 9 as the example but it seemed that sticking to non-reusable rockets would make the analogy more clear so I edited it to the Saturn V before submitting.

Fake award

[Tablizer]

Einstein's a fake, total loser, can't even use a comb right. His passport is probably fake too, #deeeport! Beliebe me, I know relativity better than my relatives, and they have bigly brains. Gravity warming is a liberal myth, just like global waves. So sad. Make American Gravity Great Again!

Another Nobel, another American

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, don't other countries fund science research? America must make up a small percentage of global R&D, how come Americans win most of the Nobel prizes?

Re:Another Nobel, another American

[JoshuaZ]

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).

Re:Another Nobel, another American

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Is there any similar map with the junk Nobels filtered out?

Re:Another Nobel, another American

[DNS-and-BIND]

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.

Re:Another Nobel, another American

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Another Nobel, another American

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Another Nobel, another American

[Anonymous Coward]

> 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.

Re:Another Nobel, another American

[lgw]

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.

Re:Another Nobel, another American

[radarskiy]

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.

Re:Another Nobel, another American

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Another Nobel, another American

[sysrammer]

Let's see if we can keep the Nobel for what it is intended, and try to not turn it into a political football.

Re:Another Nobel, another American

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Another Nobel, another American

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Another Nobel, another American

[jbengt]

Can probably count a good number of the Nobel Piece [sic] Prizes in the junk category.

Despite sharing the name Nobel, the organization that gives the "Peace" prizes out is separate from the one that awards the scientific / mathematical prizes.

Re:Another Nobel, another American

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Another Nobel, another American

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Re:Another Nobel, another American

[ClickOnThis]

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.

Re:Another Nobel, another American

[Anonymous Coward]

So you are bolstering my observation that being a west sock puppet boosted Japanese ingenuity by 30X?

Re:Fake award - YEAH!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

About Time!

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

2017 Nobel Prize For Physics

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:2017 Nobel Prize For Physics

[Anonymous Coward]

Cheers for Kip Thorne. The guy basically dedicated his whole life to general relativity (real physical theory not some superstring goose chase) and a good part of that to advancing the experimental side of general relativity.
I recommend people read the book he wrote in 1994 titled Black Holes & Time Warps Einstein's Outrageous Legacy. It's one hell of a read.

Re:2017 Nobel Prize For Physics

[Anonymous Coward]

That show kindled my love for astronomy in 3rd grade. It was amazing then and now.

Re:2017 Nobel Prize For Physics

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember watching on youtube a BBC thing from the late 80's about physics and the future.

Guests were Arthur C. Clarke, Stephen Hawking, and Carl Sagan.

If one was taking bets on who would be around in 2017, Stephen Hawking would not be on the shortlist - yet he has outlived everyone else on that program by years and years.

Dead Cert

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

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.

Is it real?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Is it real?

[Anonymous Coward]

The best solution is to build more interferometers at places as far apart as possible on the surface of the Earth (I know that there plans for space-based gravity wave detectors, but they are pipe dreams for the time being).

Barring Antartica, having 3 in the southern hemisphere (Australia, South Africa, and Patagonia, rather on the Argentinian/Atlantic side than on the seismically
very active Chilean/Pacific side) and 3 in the northern hemisphere at intermediate longitudes to form an octahedron, which is a good configuration for triangulation.
This also gives a fairly uniform coverage in polarization. Granted that this would take a lot money, but with soon 3 between th US, Italy and India, it's not far fetched to double the number of telescopes (building 6 is far from twice the cost of building 3).

Re:Is it real?

[Anonymous Coward]

With random noise it seems that there are some odds that eventually a false positive will get through filter process.

For random noise, this is easily quantifiable and factors into the basic statistics of most physics experiments. For systematic errors, it becomes more difficult as maybe there is some aspect of the noise that just happens to look like an actual signal more frequently than the basic characterization of the noise would suggest. Hence physics experiments like these that involve a small number of signals from a large project have a heavy emphasis on statistics and double checking by measurements, e.g. searching for signals in noise that should not have any real signal, inserting fake signals into system to check for false negatives, anti-fishing techniques like allowing tuning of tests on a small subset of data with final runs on full data sets not allowing any tuning, etc.

What about the Others?

[sycodon]

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.

Re:What about the Others?

[TechyImmigrant]

I'll be impressed when someone builds a working LIGO with LEGO.

Re:What about the Others?

[DNS-and-BIND]

Bureaucrats are villifed because they are villains. They manipulate the levers of government to benefit themselves, not the people they are charged to serve.

Re:What about the Others?

[Anonymous Coward]

not all of us. Many, many of us try to do what our organizations are chartered to do. However, that said, most of the one's in charge of organizations only do what they perceive as beneficial to themselves. Your worldview is way, way, way too polarized. There are infinite shades of grey.

Re:What about the Others?

[sycodon]

Do you get a pay check every week, bi-weekly, or monthly?

A Bureaucrat makes sure that you do.

Bureaucrats can be assholes and an impediment to progress. But without Bureaucrats, most progress would never be realized.

Re:What about the Others?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think they get chocolates...

Re:What about the Others?

[ChrisMaple]

Josef Stalin was kind to his daughter.

Re:What about the Others?

[Anonymous Coward]

The person at the top of the heap isn't typically referred to as a beaureacrat. I could think of a few rather more fitting terms for Stalin. -PCP

Pathetic

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are going to fucking Troll, at least make it intelligible.

Re:Pathetic

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are going to fucking Troll, at least make it intelligible.

Covfefe?

Re:Pathetic

[Tablizer]

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.

Re:Pathetic

[Anonymous Coward]

That's like saying, "If you are going to do an impression of Keith Richards, at least enunciate clearly."

Re:Pathetic

[Anonymous Coward]

But Keith Richards sounds clear if you are stoned.

What would happen if Einstein was wrong?

[jellomizer]

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.

Re:What would happen if Einstein was wrong?

[JoshuaZ]

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.

Re:What would happen if Einstein was wrong?

[ale2011]

It's damn difficult to prove that, since you didn't find it, it doesn't exist. A negation is, in fact, the complement within a set having a frontier which we don't know how far may extend.

Had Weiss, Thorne, and Barish caught no waves even after decades, people might have begun to suspect gravity waves don't exist. No prize would have been granted for a suspicion, though.

Re:What would happen if Einstein was wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

As another commenter pointed out: them not being there would also have been a big deal.

However, these detectors basically gives us another type of "telescope" to examine the universe with, which may be revolutionary in its own right. We started with optical telescopes (later pushing into the UV and IR ranges as well), and then we got radio telescopes. Now we can measure waves that are not in the EM spectrum.

Re:What would happen if Einstein was wrong?

[DalM]

A telescope is really not the best analogy. LIGO is more like inventing a deep space microphone.

Re:What would happen if Einstein was wrong?

[Khashishi]

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.

Re:What would happen if Einstein was wrong?

[Roger W Moore]

It's damn difficult to prove that, since you didn't find it, it doesn't exist.

Actually, conceptually it would be easy to prove that gravitational waves did not exist: just build a detector sensitive enough to detect gravitational waves from a source which is well known and understood and if you don't detect them Einstein would be wrong since GR makes clear predictions.

Practically that is extremely hard because any source you are certain of will be so weak that it is almost guaranteed to be impossible to detect the waves it produces with current technology. This is why LIGO had to look for extremely exotic, poorly understood sources like colliding Black Holes. Had LIGO not seen a signal it would not be clear whether that was because gravitational waves did not exist or because the rate of Black Holes colliding in the Universe was incredibly low.

Re:What would happen if Einstein was wrong?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Newton was wrong. Einstein has been proven wrong. Darwin has been proven wrong.

Einstein did not fully get quantum mechanics. He added a fudge factor to "stop" the universe from expanding. Once it was shown the universe was indeed expanding, he removed the fudge factor and admitted it was a mistake.

Darwin had many hypotheses about many evolutionary features. His ideas of how mammals could have evolved is definitely wrong. His ideas of ocean subsidence that "raised" the islands where obviously marine shell fish fossils were found several hundred feet above sea level was wrong.

Newton was positively hokey trying to "prove" the biblical chronology and trying to prove God's hands in the movement of planets.

The greatness of science is: What they got right is so much it outweighs a few things they got wrong. There is absolutely no question how great they were. And being wrong is routine and normal in science, it is nothing to be ashamed of.

And if these guys proved Einstein wrong, they will get even bigger credit and fame. And that will not detract an iota of fame or greatness of Einstein.

Re:What would happen if Einstein was wrong?

[Jason1729]

True, the Science would be sounds but the Nobel committee is as corrupt as the IOC these days.

How did the inventor of the blue LED win a Nobel prize while the inventor of the LED (including red, orange, yellow, and green) didn't share it even though he's still alive.

It's all corruption and politics. And don't even get started on Peace and Literature.

Re:What would happen if Einstein was wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

the Michelson-Morley experiment _failed_ to detect the aether.
And it is one of the most famous experiments in history.

Therefore it is the most famous failed experiment. And proved nothing. Making it about as valuable as one of Edison's 6,000 failed attempts at making a lightbulb.

Re:What would happen if Einstein was wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

A telescope is really not the best analogy. LIGO is more like inventing a deep space microphone.

That all depends on which commonly accepted definition you want to go by.

The original term was coined to specifically reference the optical portion of the RF spectrum only.
Some even say that by "optical portion" it was meant to be the visible optical portion of the RF spectrum, limiting the definition even further.

However by the pedantic version, that would exclude the IR and UV portions of the optical spectrum, despite the fact both of those forms of light can be reflected and focused using the same purely optical lenses and methods used for visible light.

By the non-pedantic version of "optical", which would refer more to the usage of lenses and mirrors and the like, while IR and UV would be included, the vast majority of the RF spectrum would then be excluded.
"Radio telescope" would not be included as a valid use of the "telescope" part of the term.

But in the end the root words that form "telescope" have nothing to do with "optical" or "visible", or even the method of using lenses/mirrors.
It simply refers to a device that changes the scale of what it is observing, technically from large to small.
(A microscope would be the same thing but in reverse, changing the scale from small to large)

While "microscope" would certainly be a more accurate description of LIGO, being that "telescope" and "microscope" each do the same thing, that is changing the scale of what they observe, calling LIGO a telescope still fits with the layman description of the device when going by the fundamental definition of a type of "scope".

Now that isn't to say "microphone" isn't also equally correct using that terms fundamental definition.
"micro" being changing the scale from small to large, and "phone" being a method of doing that to a wave.

But yet again if you go to the current pedantic definition, a "phone" suffix specifically would relate to a wave producing a sound in the audible range, similar to "scope" referring to optical RF or possibly visible light optical RF.

The point in the end being, using the pedantic definitions means LIGO is none of those things, and using the non-pedantic definition LIGO could qualify as all of them.

Seeing as the pedantic definition has the major handicap of it being required to define a wave frequency threshold to determine which term the device would fall under, and there is no clear line to set such a threshold, combined with being an article for laymen, it would probably serve the purpose much better to use the non-pedantic terms.

Re:What would happen if Einstein was wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

The one problem is if you go searching for ghosts you eventually find ghosts. That is the real problem with science nowadays.

Gravity is nothing more than a function of wave energy. It is not a pull force but a push force from within, when a neighboring atom cancels out/absorbs the wave infrared energy emitted on that side facing the neighboring atom. The opposite side of the atom emits infrared energy in the opposite direction thus providing a push toward the neighboring atom. An ever increasing push towards a neighboring atom.

You can try it out for yourself with bobbing children bathtub toys, as long as they bob at the same rate. If they both don't bob at the same rate, it will just take longer to see the affect.

Look up Pioneer anomaly.

Oh... And Einstein is wrong. Well only on gravity.

Re:What would happen if Einstein was wrong?

[HuguesT]

No, it disproved the existence of aether.

Re:What would happen if Einstein was wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except you can't prove a negative. But other than that you are quite right.

Re:What would happen if Einstein was wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

How did the inventor of the blue LED win a Nobel prize while the inventor of the LED (including red, orange, yellow, and green) didn't share it even though he's still alive.

Er, the inventor of the LED died in the 60's, and the first paper he published on the effect he discovered, the basis of all LEDs, was published in 1907.

Now as to why one would deserve a nobel prize over the other, I do personally agree that all of the teams that solved each milestone of LED tech should be equally rewarded and recognized.

One could actually argue a couple good reasons why Blue LEDs are seen as more noteworthy, but at the same time each step of the way had their own unique hurdles and difficulties to overcome, plus the officially stated reason was for the cumulative end result which obviously wouldn't have been possible without those that advanced LED tech before.

In other words if the prize would have been given not for the general reason of "inventing the blue LED" but instead for any/all of the specific difficulties needed to be overcome for that to happen, then that reason would at least have some sense to it.
Alas the reality is that isn't what happened, so it is completely valid to draw the entire decision into question.

But in case you're actually curious why blue LEDs are special in the history of such things, the simple and short answers are
a) blue light frequencies were the most difficult to produce in a LED
b) there was no accidental discovery of such a device due to the physics involved, it took specific intention to try and bend physics to our will to achieve, and
c) it was the last of the primary color LEDs to be made, which in turn was the last piece required for white LEDs, and was the last piece needed for all sorts of creations we take for granted today such as full color LED display screens.

If I recall correctly it was primarily "C" as the reason the nobel prize was granted, which as I said I don't feel is a particularly valid reason. Obviously each primary color LED is equally as important for that end result.

I'm also not very convinced that "B" would be a good reason either. Yes there was significant advancements made to other fields of science that were dependencies of blue LEDs being possible. But seeing as the lower energies of the other colors like red started off as a discovery using a cats whisker style transistor that had to be advanced to the point of a marketable product, I have no doubt that process had its own just as significant hurtles even if they were different ones.

Re:What would happen if Einstein was wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here I disagree, it disproved the existence of an aether (absolute frame of reference) relative to which the velocity of the Earth would change by 60km/s in six months.

Re:What would happen if Einstein was wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, definitely. In fact disproving general relativity, the standard model of particle physics or the Copenhagen interpretation of QM would not only net you a Nobel prize, but household-name status.

I've always thought it was the mark of a good scientist that we get more excited about being wrong than being right. One more bit of data proving a well established and tested theory? Cool, but nothing we didn't already know. Evidence disproving same? Well, now we have a chance for some really interesting new science! But first, let me check your working...

Re:What would happen if Einstein was wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

This idea for gravity was proposed long before GR and has resurfaces a could times in contrived situations, but always fails due to lack of gravity shadows allowed by theory based on mass blocking waves or pressure.

Re:What would happen if Einstein was wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

Astronomers use the term telescope for anything now that gives decent distant-source directional information to what is measuring, whether light, neutrinos, or gravity waves.

Re:What would happen if Einstein was wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

When a theory makes a very specific prediction, you can disprove it easily if you have confidence in a measurement that contradicts that prediction. When people refer to Michelson and Morley disproving "the aether", they are referring to a rather specific aether theory that was popular for a while. There were several subsequent aether related theories, but they turned out to have problems, some even easier/quicker to show to be wrong. By that point ideas down that line of thinking became too convoluted to be useful, while eventually SR and GR were found to be much, much more predictive and useful.

Re:What would happen if Einstein was wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sooner or later you will probably be right. Theories come and go. I wonder if anyone ever mentally dealt deeply with the fabric of space. Yes, space is something. It ties everything together unaffected by distance. Three dimensions can't exist without it. Two dimensions can't exist without it. Movement or distance can't exist without it. It's probably larger than the universe and would probably explain gravity and magnetism. How do you think far away galaxies stay together? Gravity, the weak force? It's all around you yet you don't know, feel or see it's existence. The universe can't work without the fabric.

Re:What would happen if Einstein was wrong?

[quanminoan]

Michelson-Morley unequivocally proved the non-existence of an interferometer based aether proof.

Re:What would happen if Einstein was wrong?

[jellomizer]

Yes, you can. If this thing you trying to disprove should have a measurable result and you are unable to measure it, despite having the ability to measure it.

Re:What would happen if Einstein was wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

Alternately, it disproved the movement of the Earth.

Re:What would happen if Einstein was wrong?

[Tablizer]

Variations of Aether theory have been revived as "dark [somethings]"

E = mc^2

[Anonymous Coward]

Where's my money, bitch?

Re:E = mc^2

[hord]

It's in the rest mass.

Posthumous awards

[93 Escort Wagon]

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.

Meanwhile Einstein got the Nobel for Chemistry

[DalM]

Well, Chemistry and some other stuff too, but not really, the Nobel commission didn't want to talk about that other stuff.

Re:Meanwhile Einstein got the Nobel for Chemistry

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, Chemistry and some other stuff too, but not really, the Nobel commission didn't want to talk about that other stuff.

Einstein got the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics mostly for the photoelectric effect. It specifically says: "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect"

He did not get a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Did you mean to say he didn't get the Nobel for General Relativity?

Re:Meanwhile Einstein got the Nobel for Chemistry

[fredrated]

He should have gotten 3 Nobel Prizes.

einstein was a plagiarist

[Anonymous Coward]

Einstein was a fraud and a plagiarist, so please give credit where due...

Re:einstein was a plagiarist

[hcs_$reboot]

Einstein was a fraud and a plagiarist, so please give credit where due...

Who?

I am a VERY happy camper

[hyades1]

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.

Shame on them!

[nanospook]

For showing up that Al Gore fellow :(

Science is a lie

[Anonymous Coward]

Trump will fix this - imprison all science commies Mr. President! MAGA!

Re:Science is a lie

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, this imprisonment for scientists is more like Clinton family work ethics.

They proved Einstein right

[hcs_$reboot]

Well, they'd have gotten the Nobel earlier if they proved Einstein wrong.

Gravity not "solved" [Re:Fake award - YEAH!!!]

[Tablizer]

And like Evolution, Gravity is nothing but a THEORY!!

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.