They Proved Einstein Right; Now They’ve Won The 2017 Physics Nobel Prize

Three colleagues, Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish, and Kip S. Thorne, have won the 2017 Nobel Prize in physics, for their contributions to work that led to the observation of gravitational waves — something that happened for the first time in 2015.

Speaking of decades of trial and error that preceded their discovery, Weiss said Tuesday, “It’s very, very exciting that it worked out in the end.”

Weiss spoke by phone to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, roughly one hour after he had been woken up by Secretary General Göran K. Hansson.

For years, the three physicists tried to find ways to find ripples in the fabric of space-time. In the 1980s, Weiss, Barish, and Thorne (along with Ronald Drever, who died in March) proposed building a facility that could detect the gravitational waves that had been predicted by Albert Einstein in his General Theory of Relativity.

The facility they built is the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which operates two huge detectors in Livingston, La., and Hanford, Washington.

Here’s how NPR’s Geoff Brumfiel explained the facilities’ work:

“Each detector looks like a big L, made up of two tunnels 2.5 miles long. It’s designed so that if a gravitational wave passes by, it will stretch space along one direction of the tunnel and squish space along the direction of the other. The stretching and squishing changes the tunnels’ lengths by a tiny amount, and that change can be detected by lasers.”

LIGO is run by the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; it’s funded by the National Science Foundation. The LIGO Scientific Collaboration now includes more than 100 institutions and 18 countries.

Although three winners were announced, the award is being split in half — one half to Weiss and the other to Barish and Thorne. The prize comes with a cash award of 9 million Swedish krona — around $1.1 million. The winners will visit Sweden for an official ceremony in December.

Last year’s Nobel in physics went to three theoretical researchers for, as NPR’s Camila Domonoske reported, “their insights into the odd behavior of matter in unusual phases, like superconductors, superfluid films and some kinds of magnets.”

This is the second announcement in a string of Nobel Prize awards that run through Monday. Yesterday, three Americans won the prize in medicine for their work on the circadian rhythm.