A SCOTTISH scientist who helped lay the foundation of research that proved the existence of gravitational waves did not live long enough to be part of the team that collected the Nobel Prize for Physics which was announced yesterday.
Scottish physicist Professor Ron Drever, who had dementia, died in March less than 18 months after his colleagues announced the detection of gravitational waves, for which three American-based scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize yesterday.
Professor Rainer Weiss, a retired Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist, was awarded half of the nine million Swedish kronor (£825,000) prize money. Theoretical physicist Professor Kip Thorne, from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and Professor Barry Barish, a former Caltech particle physicist, also now retired, shared the rest of the prize.
The historic announcement in September 2015 that tremors in the very fabric of reality had been traced to the titanic collision of two black holes was widely tipped to be a Nobel Prize winner, not least because it proved a theory of Albert Einstein that not even he ever thought would be proved.
Two huge L-shaped detectors in the US that together comprise Ligo, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, measured the infinitesimally small echo of the black holes crashing together and merging 1.3 billion light years away.
A total of 11 UK universities were involved in Ligo, and the project’s detectors are largely based on British-designed technology.
Prof Drever began his scientific career at the University of Glasgow before moving to the US to work on gravitational wave detection at Caltech where he helped to lay the foundations of Ligo.
While his contribution will be long remembered, the Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously.
Professor Sheila Rowan, director of the University of Glasgow’s Institute for Gravitational Research, a leading British Ligo scientist, said: “We’re thrilled to hear that the Nobel Prize in Physics 2017 has gone to gravitational wave detection. The discovery of the existence of gravitational waves, just over two years ago, has opened up a whole new way to understand the universe.
“Some of the first steps on the road to this new field of gravitational wave astronomy were taken here in Glasgow by Professor Ron Drever and Professor Jim Hough and we’re proud of having built on that work to evolve into the institute as we are today.”
Not only did the discovery confirm the prediction made by Albert Einstein 100 years ago, it also opened up a new window on the universe that promised to change astronomy and physics for ever.
The citation from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences read: “For decisive contributions to the Ligo detector and the observation of gravitational waves.”
In the mid-1970s, Weiss came up with a gravitational detector design based around interfering laser beams that could overcome the enormous problem of disturbing background noise.
Prof Thorne made crucial predictions about how to recognise a gravitational wave signal and Barish took over as Ligo’s second director in 1994 at a time when the experiment was at risk of being dropped.
He is largely credited with turning the project round and bringing it to completion.
Professor BS Sathyaprakash, a Ligo scientist from the University of Cardiff’s School of Physics and Astronomy, said: “We are beginning to understand if nature’s black holes are truly space-time warpage as predicted by general relativity and if the nature of gravitational waves is as predicted by Einstein.”
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