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Nobel Prize in Physics 2017

Jack Hays

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MIT and Caltech split the physics Nobel this year.


3 Americans who discovered gravitational waves win Nobel Prize in physics
Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne are members of the LIGO-Virgo detector collaboration. The Nobel committee representative said “This year’s prize is about a discovery that shook the world.”

Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne have won the 2017 Nobel Prize in physics. The three Americans are members of the LIGO-Virgo detector collaboration that discovered gravitational waves. The prize was awarded “for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves,” the committee said in a news release.
“This year’s prize is about a discovery that shook the world,” said the Nobel committee representative Göran K. Hansson in Stockholm on Tuesday.
Albert Einstein predicted in his 1915 General Theory of Relativity that distortions in gravity would travel through space-time like a shock wave. It took nearly a century to confirm that these distortions exist, a feat that required huge contraptions in two locations to detect an ultra-tiny ripple in the fabric of space.
One half of the prize went to Weiss, born in Berlin and now a U.S. citizen, who is a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The other half was split by Barish, a Nebraska native, and Thorne, who was born in Utah. Both work at the California Institute of Technology. . . . .
 
The technology was amazing. They could detect a fluctuation of 1/1000 the width of a atomic nucleus in a 14km laser beam!
 
MIT and Caltech split the physics Nobel this year.


3 Americans who discovered gravitational waves win Nobel Prize in physics
Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne are members of the LIGO-Virgo detector collaboration. The Nobel committee representative said “This year’s prize is about a discovery that shook the world.”

Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne have won the 2017 Nobel Prize in physics. The three Americans are members of the LIGO-Virgo detector collaboration that discovered gravitational waves. The prize was awarded “for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves,” the committee said in a news release.
“This year’s prize is about a discovery that shook the world,” said the Nobel committee representative Göran K. Hansson in Stockholm on Tuesday.
Albert Einstein predicted in his 1915 General Theory of Relativity that distortions in gravity would travel through space-time like a shock wave. It took nearly a century to confirm that these distortions exist, a feat that required huge contraptions in two locations to detect an ultra-tiny ripple in the fabric of space.
One half of the prize went to Weiss, born in Berlin and now a U.S. citizen, who is a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The other half was split by Barish, a Nebraska native, and Thorne, who was born in Utah. Both work at the California Institute of Technology. . . . .
Wow, I forgot all about that!

A lot of their work over the years was done through distributed computing, via the public's assistance where private individuals use their personal computers in their spare time. The prototype distribute computing project being Seti@home, out of UC Berkely. Seti@home then morphed into a universal non-project-specific platform for public assisted computing called BOINC, and once it did the floodgates opened and a plethora of research projects developed apps for the platform. LIGO is one of them, known by the moniker Einstein@home.

Distributed computing can be a fun hobby, for anyone interested. There's interesting projects for a wide range of interests, and most projects have informative discussion boards. It's a great hobby.

Reference:

Wikipedia: Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing

Wikipedia: List of Distributed Computing Projects

BOINC
 
When I first read the article I thought it said LEGO detector- thats my son's favorite toy. :2razz:
 
Wow, I forgot all about that!

A lot of their work over the years was done through distributed computing, via the public's assistance where private individuals use their personal computers in their spare time. The prototype distribute computing project being Seti@home, out of UC Berkely. Seti@home then morphed into a universal non-project-specific platform for public assisted computing called BOINC, and once it did the floodgates opened and a plethora of research projects developed apps for the platform. LIGO is one of them, known by the moniker Einstein@home.

Distributed computing can be a fun hobby, for anyone interested. There's interesting projects for a wide range of interests, and most projects have informative discussion boards. It's a great hobby.

Reference:

Wikipedia: Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing

Wikipedia: List of Distributed Computing Projects

BOINC

Excellent post. Thanks.

One of the winners acknowledged all the help they had.
". . . A team of more than 1,000 scientists, researchers and technicians make up the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. Yet three people at most can share a Nobel Prize, a rule that critics say is too restrictive.
“It is unfortunate that, due to the statutes of the Nobel Foundation, the prize has to go to no more than three people, when our marvelous discovery is the work of more than a thousand,” Thorne said in a news release Tuesday. He said the prize “rightly belongs” to the scientists and engineers who constructed the detectors and who plucked the signal from noisy data. . . ."
 
When I first read the article I thought it said LEGO detector- thats my son's favorite toy. :2razz:

That would be your bare foot.
 
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