Just last week, LIGO scientists announced they had detected gravitational waves for the fourth time, on Aug. The LIGO team has made several additional discoveries. (The LIGO detection was published in February 2016.) According to the rules of the committee, the discovery has to be published the year before the awards are announced. But Gunnar Ingelman, Secretary of the Nobel Committee and a professor of subatomic physics at Uppsala University in Sweden, said the detection of gravitational waves was not eligible last year. Some had expected the LIGO team to win the prize last year. He noted that it took more than 40 years for the discovery of antimatter to be used in positron emission tomography, or PET, scans common in hospitals today. The findings might seem esoteric, but Heuer said that it's difficult to predict when and in which field this research could have practical applications. He added that the detection of gravitational waves opens "a window into an unseen world that will bring us more information in the future about the universe." "I had really hoped for it because it's a fantastic discovery," DPG President Rolf-Dieter Heuer told Live Science. Scientists here at the German Physical Society (DPG) cheered the results. "Without them the discovery would not have happened," Nils Mårtensson, the chairman of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said of the three winners during a news conference in Stockholm. But, according to the Nobel rules, the prize can be shared by no more than three scientists. The paper announcing the September 2015 detection had more than 1,000 authors. The Nobel Committee acknowledged that the discovery was a huge collaborative effort. "It took thousands of people to come to this. "You have first to keep all the distortions out and then to increase the sensitivity of the measurement system," Winkler, who has worked on gravitational wave detection since the 1970s, told Live Science. But the changes are tiny - as tiny as one-thousandth of a diameter of a nucleon, said Walter Winkler, a physicist with the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Hannover, Germany. If a gravitational wave passes through Earth, the laser in one arm of the detector will be compressed and the other will expand. The L-shaped LIGO detectors have two arms, each 2.48 miles (4 kilometers) long, with identical laser beams inside. The book closes with a reflection by philosopher Don Howard on the significance of Einstein's theory for the philosophy of science.Įdited by Jed Buchwald, Einstein Was Right is a compelling and thought-provoking account of one of the most thrilling scientific discoveries of the modern age.It took scientists such a long time to arrive at the discovery because gravitational waves - even though they come from violent, powerful collisions - are extremely small once they reach Earth.ĭuring the event detected in September 2015, scientists think that about three times the mass of the sun was transformed into gravitational waves in less than a second. Theoretical physicist Alessandra Buonanno discusses the new possibilities opened by gravitational wave astronomy, and sociologist of science Harry Collins and historians of science Diana Kormos Buchwald, Daniel Kennefick, and J rgen Renn provide further insights into the history of relativity and LIGO. This illuminating book features an introduction by Tilman Sauer and invaluable firsthand perspectives on the history and significance of the LIGO consortium by physicists Barry Barish and Kip Thorne. Shedding new light on the hundred-year history of this momentous achievement, Einstein Was Right brings together essays by two of the physicists who won the Nobel Prize for their instrumental roles in the discovery, along with contributions by leading scholars who offer unparalleled insights into one of the most significant scientific breakthroughs of our time. A century later, researchers with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) confirmed Einstein's prediction, detecting gravitational waves generated by the collision of two black holes. In 1915, Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves-ripples in the fabric of spacetime caused by the movement of large masses-as part of the theory of general relativity.
An authoritative interdisciplinary account of the historic discovery of gravitational waves
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