The Nobel Prize: Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish And Kip Throne

The Nobel Prize

On Tuesday, October 3, 2017, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics to three American men, Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish, and Kip Throne. Their award worthy contribution to science? The reality of their vision that gravitational waves could be detected, observed, and measured. The idea that gravitational waves exist is not a new concept. Renowned physicist, Albert Einstein, predicted their existence over one hundred years ago. However, he maintained that the ability to observe them was not attainable. Nevertheless, that capability finally came to culmination on September 14, 2015. The scientists not only saw the gravitational waves, but also heard them! “Everything else in astronomy is like the

It all lead to the invention of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory; lovingly referred to as the LIGO. The LIGO is a machine that spans about two and a half miles. It is made of two tubes that are at 90-degree angles and form an “L” shape. At the end of each tube is a mirror. A laser beam of light travels back and forth down the tubes. If a gravitational wave hits the laser beam, it causes a ripple. The movement is infinitesimal. Since the movement is so small, any outside movement or sounds, such as ocean waves hitting a shoreline or airplanes flying through the sky, can disturb the measurements taken. To that end, Rainer Weiss, one of the scientists to win the Nobel Prize, invented a laser-based gravitational wave detector that can distinguish between background noise and actual gravitational waves. His research and work actually began in the mid-1970s. More recently, Physicists continued to make modifications to the LIGO “to increase it’s sensitivity to the point where the team could realistically expect to hear something” (NYTimes.com) The total cost of the LIGO detector is a staggering one billion dollars

With this invention, scientists will be able to research further into space and make new discoveries about things in the universe that we currently do not know even exist. At this time, the gravitational wave detector is about two and a half miles long, but scientists continue to work on making bigger and better detectors that would have to be buried underground. These detectors would be placed in tunnels hundreds of miles long. Even more amazing, there are researchers who want to place laser interferometers in space. No matter where they are, these lasers are sure to provide us with more knowledge than we have ever had about our ever-expanding world. The plan is to create interferometers “big enough to see gravitational waves emitted by any merging supermassive black holes that may have existed around the time when the universe’s first stars began to shine, about a hundred million years after the big bang” (Scientific American). Through this invention, scientists have also introduced the ability to travel through time. They have already put muons through the wormhole, sending them into the future. Einstein also predicted these wormholes through his theory of