MIT Physicist Named Nobel Prize Co-Winner

CAMBRIDGE, MA — This week the 2017 Nobel Prize for Physics went to three American scientists, including MIT professor emeritus of physics Rainer Weiss, for their roles in capturing actual gravitational waves.

According to the Nobel Prize website, Weiss and his co-workers Kip S. Thorne, professor emeritus of theoretical physics at Caltech, and Barry C. Barish, professor emeritus of physics at Caltech, observed gravitational waves for the first time on Sept. 14, 2015.

The Nobel Prize brings world acclaim and comes with a $1.1 million payout, in this case to be split three ways.

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"The waves, which were predicted by Albert Einstein a hundred years ago, came from a collision between two black holes. It took 1.3 billion years for the waves to arrive at the LIGO detector in the USA," a release announcing the prize reads. "The signal was extremely weak when it reached Earth, but is already promising a revolution in astrophysics. Gravitational waves are an entirely new way of observing the most violent events in space and testing the limits of our knowledge."

LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, is a collaborative project with more than 1,000 researchers from more than 20 countries.

In a press conference on Tuesday at MIT, Weiss credited the win to his entire team.

“The discovery has been the work of a large number of people, many of whom played crucial roles,” Weiss said. “I view receiving this [award] as sort of a symbol of the various other people who have worked on this.”

Gravitational waves are extremely faint ripples in the fabric of space and time that come from some of the most violent events in the universe. The four observations came from the merger of two black holes. The first one was 1.3 billion light-years away.

These waves stretch in one dimension - like left and right - while compressing in another, such as up and down. Then they switch, Weiss explained.

“We are immensely proud of Rai Weiss, and we also offer admiring best wishes to his chief collaborators and the entire LIGO team,” MIT President L. Rafael Reif said in a statement. “The creativity and rigor of the LIGO experiment constitute a scientific triumph; we are profoundly inspired by the decades of ingenuity, optimism, and perseverance that made it possible.... Today’s announcement reminds us, on a grand scale, of the value and power of fundamental scientific research and why it deserves society’s collective support.”

Weiss was born Berlin, Germany. Ph.D in 1932 and graduated from from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1962 with a Ph.D.

Both Thorne and Weiss were convinced that gravitational waves could be detected — despite the fact that Albert Einstein thought it would never be possible — and bring about a revolution in our knowledge of the universe, according to the release.

From the Nobel Prize Website:

"The LIGO project's achievement was using a pair of gigantic laser interferometers to measure a change thousands of times smaller than an atomic nucleus, as the gravitational wave passed the Earth.

So far all sorts of electromagnetic radiation and particles, such as cosmic rays or neutrinos, have been used to explore the universe. However, gravitational waves are direct testimony to disruptions in space time itself. This is something completely new and different, opening up unseen worlds. A wealth of discoveries awaits those who succeed in capturing the waves and interpreting their message."

Content from an AP report was used in this article.

Courtesy Photo / MIT