2017 Nobel Prize for Gravitational Waves

Yes, that’s it.

Today Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne (you do remember him, right? Interstellar, anyone?) and Barry Barish won the Nobel Prize 2017 – Physics. The ripples were first predicted by Albert Einstein – they are a fundamental consequence of his General Theory of Relativity – have finally been detected. As the BBC article explains,

“the winners are members of the Ligo-Virgo observatories, which were responsible for the breakthrough. […] Gravitational waves describe the stretching and squeezing of space-time that occurs when massive objects accelerate.The warping of space resulting from the merger of two black holes was initially picked up by the US Ligo laboratory in 2015 – the culmination of a decades-long quest.”

To read the whole story, have a look here.

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