Updated
Photo:
Three scientists, including Rainer Weiss, were key to the first observation of gravitational waves. (AP: Andrew Harnik, file)
Three scientists who spent decades in search of
gravitational waves and accomplished a feat Albert Einstein thought
would never be possible are awarded this year's Nobel Physics Prize.
Sweden's
Royal Academy of Sciences announced on the winners were Rainer Weiss of
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Barry Barish and Kip
Thorne of the California Institute of Technology.The three were key to the first observation of gravitational waves in September 2015.
Dr Weiss, in a phone call with the news conference at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said: "I view this more as a thing that recognises the work of a thousand people."
When the discovery was announced several months later, it was a sensation not only among scientists but the general public.
Gravitational waves are extremely faint ripples in the fabric of space and time, generated by some of the most violent events in the universe.
The ripples are so small — only a fraction the size of an atom — that Einstein thought they had to be beyond our technology.
Gravitational waves were predicted by Einstein a century ago as part of his theory of general relativity.
General relativity says that gravity is caused by heavy objects bending space-time, which itself is the four-dimensional way that astronomers see the universe.
The waves detected by the laureates came from the collision of two black holes some 1.3 billion light-years away.
A light-year is about 9.46 trillion kilometres.
Photo:
Goran Hansson, centre, of the Secretary General of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, announces the winners.
The German-born Dr Weiss was awarded half of the 9 million Swedish kronor ($1.4 million) prize amount and Dr Thorne and Dr Barish will split the other half.
For the past 25 years, the physics prize has been shared among multiple winners.
Last year's prize went to three British-born researchers who applied the mathematical discipline of topology to help understand the workings of exotic matter such as superconductors and superfluids.
In 2014, a Japanese and a Canadian shared the physics prize for studies that proved that the elementary particles called neutrinos have mass.
AP
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