And that's a wrap
It was the result we expected: Kip Thorne, Rainer Weiss and Barry Barish have won the 2017 Nobel prize in physics for the Ligo instrument and its detection of gravitational waves, the ripples in spacetime first predicted by Einstein 100 years ago.
You can read our news story on the prize here. An article on what gravitational wave observatories will mean for science will follow.
Thanks for joining us for today’s excitement. We’ll be back at 10am UK time on Wednesday to hear who has won the 2017 Nobel prize in chemistry. That announcement is due from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences at 10.45am UK time.
Not to be parochial, but a good number of British scientists work on the Ligo project, with researchers from Glasgow, Birmingham and Cardiff universities all contributing to the construction of the instrument and analysis of the results.
Professor B S Sathyaprakash, head of the gravitational physics group at Cardiff University, said:
It took 100 years to confirm the existence of gravitational waves but our observations over the past two years have already raised questions about the formation and evolution of black holes and allowed us to test Einstein’s gravity to incredibly greater precision than was possible before. We are beginning to understand if Nature’s black holes are truly spacetime warpage as predicted by general relativity and if the nature of gravitational waves is as predicted by Einstein.
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Rainer Weiss, in a phone call to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences today, stressed right away that the prize honours the work of the whole collaboration rather than the three individuals named by the Nobel committee:
I view this more as a thing that recognises the work of about 1,000 people, a really dedicated effort that’s been going on for – I hate to tell you – as long as 40 years.
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Andrea Taroni, Editor of Nature Physics, picks up on the same points as Rees:
This is not exactly a surprise. But no less deserved for that matter! I guess it raises the question of not allowing entire collaborations to win the prize. It’s easy to forget that all those people toiling away on the Ligo and Virgo experiments before February last year were doing so with considerably less public attention and good will. So they all definitely deserve the attention they are getting too.
My colleague Hannah Devlin has been in touch with Sir Martin Rees, emeritus professor of physics at the University of Cambridge, and the Astronomer Royal. He’s made some interesting points:
The fact that the Nobel committee refuses to make group awards is of course causing them increasingly frequent problems, and giving a misleading and unfair impression of how a lot of science is actually done.
However, in this case they have apportioned credit appropriately among three of the acknowledged key leaders, all of whom would be acknowledged as outstanding individuals and whose contributions were distinctive and complementary.
Weiss would be acknowledged as crucial to devising (along with the late Ron Drever) the amazingly precise laser techniques, and seeing them through to successful implementation. Thorne, an outstanding theorist, mentor, and intellectual leader, has been an inspiring cheerleader of Ligo for three decades, and Barish, with prior experience of managing large projects in particle physics, was brought in co-coordinate the development and construction of the facilities.
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Today’s winners make it six out of six so far for US scientists in the 2017 Nobel prizes. Yesterday, the medicine prize went to the all-US trio of Michael Rosbash, Michael Young and Jeffrey Hall for their research on circadian rhythms.
Here’s our breakdown from last year on how the countries fare in the Nobel prize rankings.
Here’s a description of the prize-winning work from the Nobel committee:
On 14 September 2015, the universe’s gravitational waves were observed for the very first time. The waves, which were predicted by Albert Einstein a hundred years ago, came from a collision between two black holes. It took 1.3bn years for the waves to arrive at the Ligo detector in the USA.
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 over one thousand researchers from more than twenty countries. Together, they have realised a vision that is almost fifty years old. The 2017 Nobel Laureates have, with their enthusiasm and determination, each been invaluable to the success of Ligo. Pioneers Rainer Weiss and Kip S Thorne, together with Barry C Barish, the scientist and leader who brought the project to completion, ensured that four decades of effort led to gravitational waves finally being observed.
In the mid-1970s, Rainer Weiss had already analysed possible sources of background noise that would disturb measurements, and had also designed a detector, a laser-based interferometer, which would overcome this noise. Early on, both Kip Thorne and Rainer Weiss were firmly convinced that gravitational waves could be detected and bring about a revolution in our knowledge of the universe.
Gravitational waves spread at the speed of light, filling the universe, as Albert Einstein described in his general theory of relativity. They are always created when a mass accelerates, like when an ice-skater pirouettes or a pair of black holes rotate around each other. Einstein was convinced it would never be possible to measure them. 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 spacetime 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.
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MIT have a good video explaining how the Ligo detector works. It’s an extraordinary instrument:
Here’s the first “chirp” recorded by the Ligo detector when it picked up the outpouring of gravitational waves from two black holes crashing into one another:
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Olga Botner from the Nobel committee has been talking about the momentous discovery of gravitational waves with the Ligo detector:
Once upon a time a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away two massive black holes engaged in a deadly dance. Revolving around each other, spiralling faster and faster, whirling finally at half the velocity of light, they collided and merged forming an even more massive black hole. This momentous event reverberated through space and time as gravitational waves sped outwards carrying information on what had just happened.
This event took place about 1.3bn years ago at a time when the first multicellular life emerged on Earth. Ever since then have the gravitational wavs sped through the universe, reaching our cosmic neighbourhood, the Magellanic cloud, about 200,000 years ago when early Homo sapiens walked in Africa, and finally swept to the Earth on September 14th 2015 when the waves were recorded by perhaps the most sensitive instrument ever devised by man: the Ligo interferometer gravitational wave observatory.
This event caused a sensation worldwide. We knew that gravitational waves existed indirectly, but this was the first time ever they had been directly observed.
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There we have it: the prize goes to the construction of the Ligo gravitational wave detector and the amazing discovery of those waves early last year. Here’s our piece on the first detection back in February 2016.
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And the winner is ...
BREAKING NEWS The 2017 #NobelPrize in Physics is awarded to Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne @LIGO. pic.twitter.com/za1GNsAfnE
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 3, 2017
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Here we go! The committee has entered the room.
It’d be nice, of course, to see the prize go to John Pendry and others for invisibility cloaks. Which aren’t very cloak-ish, but they are still amazing materials.
We’ve just heard that the announcement has been postponed for five minutes. A disagreement, perhaps, at the voting stage? We shall find out soon.
Let’s not read too much into this, but are they making only one call? I doubt it. If the physics prize goes to only one researcher, I shall eat my dictaphone.
Our Secretary General Göran K. Hansson and Chairman of the Prize Committee Gunnar Ingelman are making the magic phone call! #NobelPrize pic.twitter.com/1ZXCypiyrJ
— Vetenskapsakademien (@vetenskapsakad) October 3, 2017
In case you’re a fan of Peter Higgs – and let’s face it, who isn’t – here he is with an analogy of the Higgs boson and the Higgs field. He wrote down the theory that predicted the particle in 1964, a mere 48 years before it was discovered at the Large Hadron Collider.
Clever-clogs John Bardeen is the only person to have won two physics Nobel prizes. He won in 1956 for work on semiconductors and the transistor effect (without which modern life would be distinctly unmodern) and again in 1972 for his part in the development of superconductor theory. He’s a good contender for world’s top nerd, though admittedly there is no shortage of competition.
The Nobel committee are in a huddle and, if they haven’t already, are soon to cast their votes.
The Royal Swedish Academy @vetenskapsakad selects the Physics Laureate(s) through a majority vote, starting now 9:00 a.m. CET #NobelPrize
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 3, 2017
It’s hard to think of a more famous winner of the physics prize than Albert Einstein. Here he is speaking about peace, nuclear weapons, and his theory of special relativity:
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The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has handed out 110 physics prizes since 1901. The average age of winners is 55, but William Lawrence Bragg bagged the prize with his dad, William Henry, at the tender age of 25, the scamp. Their work involved using x-rays to analyse crystal structures.
Only two women have ever won the physics prize: Marie Curie in 1903 for her work on radiation, and Maria Goeppert Mayer in 1963 for her work on nuclear shell structure.
The 2016 Nobel prize in physics
Last year, the physics Nobel went to three Brits. David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz won for their work on exotic states of matter. Their work helps explain why some materials have unexpected electrical properties such as superconductivity, and in future could pave the way for quantum computers.
The Edinburgh-based physicist, Peter Higgs, won the physics prize in 2013 along with Francois Englert for work on what became known as the Higgs boson. The particle was discovered at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012, a momentous day for Cern. When it came to the morning of the Nobel announcement, Higgs decided to pop out to an art exhibition. He was told the news by a former neighbour who happened to drive past him that morning. She said: “Congratulations, my daughter called me from London to tell me about the award!” To which Higgs replied: “what award?”
What the pundits say
Let’s be clear: a lot of people are expecting the physics prize will go to the scientists who brought us the first discovery of gravitational waves at the start of 2016. Rainer Weiss, emeritus professor at MIT, was central to designing the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Ligo) which detected the ripples in spacetime. Weiss worked on plans for the instrument with Ronald Drever, a Scot based at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), who, sadly, died earlier this year. The Nobel prize is not generally awarded posthumously, though an exception was made in 2011 when the medicine committee was unaware that Ralph Steinman, an immune system researcher at Rockefeller, had passed away a few days before the prize announcement. Along with Reiss, then, we may see the prize honouring Kip Thorne, a theoretical physicist at Caltech, who worked out what gravitational waves should look like to Ligo. Another contender for the prize is Ligo’s former director, Barry Barish.
Clarivate Analytics, which runs a platform called Web of Science, has crunched the data on which scientists are most cited by others: a good measure of their impact on a field. They have come up with some favourites for the Nobel. One trio they note is Phaedon Avouris at IBM’s TJ Watson Research Center in New York, Cornelis Dekker at TU Delft, and Paul McEuen at Cornell, for their work on carbon-based electronics. But they also propose Mitchell Feigenbaum at Rockefeller University for his work on nonlinear and chaotic physical systems and for the identification of the Feigenbaum constant (don’t ask); and Rashid A Sunyaev, director of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, for his work on the origins of the universe, galactic formation processes, disc accretion of black holes, and other cosmological phenomena. Which does sound rather impressive when you tap it out.
Another scientist in with a chance is William Borucki, the project scientist on Nasa’s Kepler Space Telescope, which has spotted more than 1,000 planets outside our solar system.
Yesterday, three American scientists won the 2017 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for their painstaking work on circadian rhythms. It was a popular prize and one that seems to have honoured the right trio of researchers. Which isn’t always the case with the Nobels.
If you want a sense of the shock some scientists experience when they hear the news, here’s one of yesterday’s winners, Michael Young at Rockefeller University in New York, speaking about how he was so stunned he could barely get his shoes on:
I’d go and I’d pick up the shoes, and then I’d realise I need the socks ... And then I realised I needed to put my pants on first.
This morning, the Nobel Assembly will name the winner, or more likely winners, of the physics prize. We’re expecting the announcement at 10.45am UK time, and it will be made at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.
Do join us for the live announcements, explanations of the research, and reaction from the winners and others from the world of science.
