Gravitational Waves Win 2017 Nobel Prize In Physics, The Ultimate Fusion Of Theory And Experiment
“The 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics may have gone to three individuals who made an outstanding contribution to the scientific enterprise, but it’s a story about so much more than that. It’s about all the men and women over more than 100 years who’ve contributed, theoretically and experimentally and observationally, to our understanding of the precise workings of the Universe. Science is much more than a method; it’s the accumulated knowledge of the entire human enterprise, gathered and synthesized together for the betterment of everyone. While the most prestigious award has now gone to gravitational waves, the science of this phenomenon is only in its earliest stages. The best is yet to come.”
It’s official at long last: the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to three individuals most responsible for the development and eventual direct detection of gravitational waves. Congratulations to Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Barry Barish, whose respective contributions to the experimental setup of gravitational wave detectors, theoretical predictions about which astrophysical events produce which signals, and the design-and-building of the modern LIGO interferometers helped make it all possible. The story of directly detecting gravitational waves is so much more, however, than the story of just these three individuals, or even than the story of their collaborators. Instead, it’s the ultimate culmination of a century of theoretical, experimental, and instrumentational work, dating back to Einstein himself. It’s a story that includes physics titans Howard Robertson, Richard Feynman, and Joseph Weber. It includes Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor, who won a Nobel decades earlier for the indirect detection of gravitational waves. And it’s the story of over 1,000 men and women who contributed to LIGO and VIRGO, bringing us into the era of gravitational wave astronomy.
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