The Nobel Prize in Physics 2017: Everything You Need to Know
“Unviewable” Gravitational Waves
The first week of October is one that every science enthusiast marks in their calendars: it’s when the Nobel Prizes are announced. Yes, the Oscars of science are in full swing right now, and one of the most hyped honours has just been announced: the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Unsurprisingly, the prize has gone to Kip Thorne, Rainer Weiss, and Barry C Barish. This trio was top prediction and a shoo-in for their work on gravitational waves. Through their work on the LIGO Machine, they managed to view waves that Einstein himself deemed “unviewable”.
LIGO stands for Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. It is likely the most sensitive instrument ever created by mankind, and through Thorne, Weiss, and Barish’s work, it picked up gravitational waves caused by a cosmic event that occurred over 1.3 billion years ago.
Since black holes emit no light, the only way they can be studied is through their affect on gravitational waves. The waves discovered by LIGO were caused by two black holes who collided and formed a massive hole. Their impact was a catastrophic galactic event, and the impact of their billion-year-old waves was just felt by Earth in September of 2015.
Einstein is famous for his theories of gravitational waves. But his idea was only shown mathematically — they were only proven definitively over 20 years later. Still, it was again only a mathematical proof, and there had never been any actual physical contact with the waves. They interact incredibly weakly with matter, and are nearly undetectable.
Thorne, Weiss, and Barish’s discovery is undeniably one of the most influential and iconic in the recent history of science. Their detection of gravitational waves in September of 2015 is truly one that made waves throughout the science community, and there’s nobody more deserving of science’s highest honour.
