Three scientists awarded Nobel Physics Prize for work on gravtitational waves
Stockholm: Scientists Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne won the 2017 Nobel Prize for Physics for decisive contributions in the observation of gravitational waves, the award-giving body said on Tuesday.
“This is something completely new and different, opening up unseen worlds,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement on awarding the 9 million Swedish crown ($1.1 million)prize.
“A wealth of discoveries awaits those who succeed in capturing the waves and interpreting their message.”
Physics is the second of this year’s crop of Nobel Prizes and comes after Americans Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael Young were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine on Monday.
All three scientists played a leading role in the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or Ligo, experiment, which made the first historic observation of gravitational waves in September 2015.
Predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago as part of his theory of general relativity but only first detected in 2015, gravitational waves are 'ripples' in the fabric of space-time caused by violent processes in the Universe, such as colliding black holes or the collapse of stellar cores.
Dr. Karan Jani is working with these scientists in LIGO and he was one of the winner of the Forbes 30 under 30 list for 2017 for his contributions to the research on gravitational waves. Dr Jani stated, "This Noble Prize in Physics is a tribute to the legacy of Albert Einstein, a testimony of a 100-year long scientific persistence to understand our universe in a rational way and an assurance of the wonders humanity can achieve with consistent funding of fundamental science by the government."
"The discovery of the four dimensional space time ripples (aka Gravitational Waves) with the LIGO detector is allowing us to probe parts of the universe that no telescope has seen till date. We now know a completely new population of black holes in our universe, waves from, which is hitting our Earth almost every 15 minutes. All these billion years, no species on this planet could evolve to comprehend these waves. But we did. We built scientific theories, built technology, progressed to maintain peaceful societies where the entire world can collaborate and make this historic detection possible," he added.
"At a personal level, this prize is a validation of the journey that started from a small town of India, a place where the word astrophysics was unheard, to now finally after a decade-long research and education that I can contribute and carry the legacy of Gravity from Newton to Einstein to LIGO," concluded Dr Jani.
Dr. Karan Jani is an astrophysicist, a scientist in the LIGO experiment and a research scholar on education and national security policies.
