The 2017 Nobel Physics Prize has been awarded to awarded “for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of
gravitational waves” to Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory.
“This is something completely new and different, opening up unseen worlds,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement on awarding the 9 million Swedish crown ($1.1 million) prize on October 3, 2017. “A wealth of discoveries awaits those who succeed in capturing the waves and interpreting their message.”
Predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago as part of his theory of general relativity but only first detected in 2015, gravitational waves are “ripples” in the fabric of space-time caused by violent processes in the Universe, such as colliding black holes or the collapse of stellar cores.
“Their discovery shook the world,” said Goran K Hansson, the head of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences.
For the past 25 years, the prize has been shared among multiple winners.
The
2016 prize went to three British-born researchers who applied the mathematical discipline of topology to help understand the workings of exotic matter such as superconductors and superfluids. In 2014, a Japanese and a Canadian shared the physics prize for studies that proved that the elementary particles called neutrinos have mass.
The
2017 Nobel medicine prize went Monday to three Americans studying circadian rhythms better known as body clocks- Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young.
(With inputs from Reuters, AP, AFP)
