The role of Barish, also a professor at Caltech, is to bring together many projects into a single LIGO and take over managerial functions. Compared to other co-founders of LIGO, Thorne is not only one of the world's top experts in general theory relativity (and, in particular, on the theory of gravity), but also one of the world's most famous popularizers of science. He was one of the inspirations for the creation of the film Interstellar, during the filming of which he also acted as a scientific consultant and executive producer of the film. Thus, Thorne is the first Hollywood producer to receive a Nobel Prize.
2. Russian participation
Being a predominantly American project, LIGO brings together several dozen scientific groups, which employ about 1,000 scientists from around the world. Two Russian groups are also participating in the project - one led by Moscow professor Valery Mitrofanov, the other headed by Nizhny Novgorod scientist Alexander Sergeev.
Sergeev, who has been heading the Russian academy Sciences, RBC, that the basis for the discovery was laid back in 1962 by the Soviet scientist Vladislav Pustovoit, who proposed a scheme for using a laser to fix gravitational waves. Nevertheless, the discovery of 2015 is, according to Sergeev, "a triumph of human thought and a triumph of equipment."
Professor of Moscow State University Mitrofanov, another LIGO participant, what exactly three Nobel laureates contributed largest contribution to the creation of the project. “To register such a weak signal is a dream for physicists. Thanks to the efforts of the entire LIGO team and the laureates, we finally managed to do this, ”he said in a conversation with RBC.
Rainer Weiss and Kip Thorne (left to right)
3. The essence of the discovery
The task of LIGO is to confirm in practice the existence of gravitational waves, which Albert Einstein spoke about in his general theory of relativity in 1916. Gravitational waves are fluctuations in space-time (physicists also say "ripples in the fabric of space-time"), produced by the movement of massive bodies in the Universe with variable acceleration. Each of the two LIGO observatories is equipped with a gravitational wave detector placed in a vacuum and capable of detecting oscillations thousands of times smaller than atomic nucleus, the Nobel Committee said in a statement. A light wave travels a distance of 3002 km between objects in a straight line in 10 ms. Since the gravitational wave is also assumed to travel at the speed of light, changing the value of the travel time for the wave through one observatory and another is intended to help find the direction of motion, and hence the source of the wave.
LIGO recorded gravitational waves on the morning of September 14, 2015. For several months, LIGO experts, together with colleagues from the French-Italian center Virgo, analyzed the information received. In February 2016, scientists presented the results of the study: the September 14 event was indeed the first direct observation of gravitational waves. The LIGO instruments, the statement said, recorded a wave from the merger of two black holes at a distance of 1.3 billion light-years from Earth.
4. A new tool for penetrating the Universe
The discovery of gravitational waves in the message of the Nobel Committee is called "a revolution in astrophysics", which provides a fundamentally new way to study the cosmos. "A whole treasure of discovery awaits those who can catch these waves and read the message hidden in them," the press release says.
Over the past two years, LIGO and Virgo physicists have recorded the movement of gravitational waves three more times. The last observation took place on August 14, 2017, it was officially announced last week. LIGO spokesman David Shoemaker noted that a new round of joint observation by LIGO and Virgo experts is scheduled for the fall of 2018, and such discoveries are "expected to be once a week or more."
As Professor Sheila Rowan from the University of Glasgow noted, the joint work of LIGO and Virgo allowed "to expand the amount of data that we will receive in the future and which will help us better understand the Universe."
LIGO member Professor Mitrofanov told RBC that the detection of gravitational waves opens new area Sciences. “We used to look at what was happening in deep space, mostly in the electromagnetic spectrum. And now such a channel of information as gravitational waves has been added, and it has much more possibilities. They go from the first moments after big bang when our universe was formed,” he said.
Thorne himself spoke about the potential possibilities of mankind after the discovery of gravitational waves in his book Interstellar: Science Behind the Scenes. It was published in 2015, shortly after the release of the blockbuster Interstellar and shortly before the opening of LIGO.
LIGO Executive Director David Reitze (Photo: Gary Cameron/Reuters)
5. Science and cinema
into the sphere scientific interests Thorne enters the search for the possible practical application this knowledge. For example, we are talking about moving in time and space. Since the 1980s, Thorne has been studying the possibility of the existence of so-called wormholes, or “wormholes,” a kind of “tunnels” in space that allow you to instantly move from one point to another. Einstein wrote about the probable existence of such "tunnels", thus explaining a number of provisions of his theory of relativity. Thorne, who develops this theory, is one of the authors of the "traversable wormhole" hypothesis. Thorne assures that at the current stage of technological development, interstellar flights are impossible. “With the technologies of the 21st century, we are unable to reach other star systems faster than thousands of years of travel. Our only illusory hope for interstellar travel is a wormhole or some other extreme form of space-time curvature,” he writes in last book Thorne hopes that a breakthrough in the study of gravitational waves will help get closer to solving this issue.
Thorne visualized his theoretical and practical developments in the film Interstellar, which was released in the fall of 2014. “I had the privilege of being involved in its creation from the very beginning, helping [director Christopher] Nolan and his colleagues weave the ingredients of true science into the fabric of the story,” Thorne wrote.
In fact, Thorne acted as the creator of the idea of the film itself, and in the course of working on the picture he tried to model the existing gravitational theories. Beginning work on the film in 2005, Thorne set director Steven Spielberg, who was originally going to take on the picture, two conditions. The events of the film must not contradict the laws of physics, and the physical theories used in the script must be scientifically supported, that is, accepted by at least part of the scientific community.
6. Friends-Rivals
For Thorn, the Nobel Prize was at least the ninth scientific award in the year and a half since the publication of the announcement of the discovery of LIGO. Nevertheless, he has been studying gravity for the past half century.
Almost from the very beginning of his research activities, Thorne has been friends with another famous popularizer of science and explorer of the universe, Stephen Hawking. The views of the two scientists on cosmic phenomena sometimes coincided, sometimes diverged. Friends-rivals regularly make public bets on scientific matters. The last such dispute, which began in 1991 (for connoisseurs - Thorne allowed the existence of naked singularities, Hawking - no) ended in 1997 with the victory of Kip Thorne. He received £100 from his opponent and a piece of clothing with an inscription in which Stephen admitted defeat (Kip Thorne does not give other details in his story about this story).
Now the rivalry between the two luminaries of world science is becoming even more dramatic: Stephen Hawking does not yet have a Nobel Prize. However, following the success of Interstellar, which won an Oscar for best visual effects (which Thorne was directly involved in), Thorne announced that he was preparing a new sci-fi film - and this time with Hawking. He spoke about this in November 2016 in a lecture at the Physics Department of Moscow State University.
Laureates of the Nobel Prize in Physics 2017
Rainer Weiss was born in 1932 in Berlin. After the Nazis came to power in Germany, Weiss's parents moved first to Czechoslovakia, then to the United States. In 1955, he received a bachelor's degree from MIT, then completed his doctoral studies at Princeton University, and has been teaching at MIT since 1964. He is the author of dozens scientific works in astrophysics, gravity and the use of lasers.
Kip Thorne was born in 1940 in Utah to a Mormon family. Now, however, the scientist calls himself an atheist. In 1962, he completed his undergraduate studies at Caltech, then defended his thesis in geometrodynamics (the reduction of physical objects to geometric ones) at Princeton University. Since 1967 he has taught theoretical physics at Caltech. Author of several scientific theories and works on astrophysics.
Barry Barish was born in Nebraska in 1936. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to California, where Barish entered the University of Berkeley, and from 1963 worked at Caltech. His research interests include experimental high-energy physics. Since the 1980s, he has been interested in creating equipment for capturing magnetic and other waves, and in 1994 he inspired the creation of the joint LIGO project.
The 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics will go to Rainer Weiss, Barry K. Barysh and Kip S. Thorne. On Tuesday, October 3, the Institute's Nobel Committee named the laureates.
Nobel laureates in Physics in 2017 were Rainer Weiss, Barry K. Barysh, and Kip S. Thorne for detecting gravitational waves with the LIGO detector.
LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory) is joint project more than 1000 researchers from more than 20 countries.
On September 14, 2015, the gravitational waves of the Universe, which Albert Einstein spoke about 100 years ago, were first discovered. The waves were created by the collision of two black holes. It took 1.3 billion years for the waves to reach the LIGO detector in the US.
Experimental confirmation of Albert Einstein's theory of gravitational waves was announced in February 2016. 100 years ago, Eintstein in his theory of relativity described that gravitational waves travel at the speed of light, filling the universe, but he could not imagine that they could be measured. American physicists using a laser for the first time measured the length of four-kilometer tunnels, which decreased and increased under the influence of gravitational waves.
What is the revolution?
The press release of the Nobel Committee notes that so far all types of electromagnetic radiation were used to explore the universe. However, "gravitational waves are direct evidence of the existence of interruptions in the space-time plane." "This is something completely new and different, it opens up invisible worlds. "Many discoveries await those who succeed in the study of gravitational waves and interpret their message," the Nobel Committee concluded.
David Thouless, Duncan Haldana and Michael Kosterlitz "for their theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter." Scientists have studied "strange" states of matter.
As you know, Nobel Week started in Stockholm on October 2. On Monday, the committee named names. They were Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rozbash and Michael Young. Scientists will receive the award for "discovering the molecular mechanisms that control circadian rhythms." We are talking about cyclic fluctuations in the intensity of various biological processes associated with the change of day and night.
On October 4, the winner in the field of chemistry will be announced. The Literature Laureate will be announced on October 5th. The Peace Prize winner will be announced on October 6th. On October 9, the Nobel Committee will award the Swedish National Bank Prize in Economics in memory of Alfred Nobel.
Nobel Prize in Physics for 2017 was awarded to the creators of the LIGO international collaboration, thanks to which the first gravitational waves were discovered - physicists Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorn. Half of the prize money went to Weiss, while Barish and Thorn each received a quarter.
“Of course, a very well-deserved Nobel Prize. Compared to premiums recent years- one of the most well-deserved awards, because this is a fundamental discovery, which was expected 100 years after Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves. The scientists who received the award made a decisive contribution to the construction and creation of a gravitational antenna in their time, - Russian physicist, Professor Mikhail Gorodetsky commented on the award to Gazeta.Ru. —
The LIGO project involves a lot of countries, a lot of teams from different institutions, including Russia. There are two scientific groups in Russia: one at Moscow State University, the other at Nizhny Novgorod Institute applied physics. That is, Russian scientists also contributed to this discovery. This is truly the work of the century.”
Gravitational waves are changes in the gravitational field that propagate like waves. Their existence was assumed by many scientists, including Albert Einstein. The discovery of such waves was first reported in 1969 by the American physicist Joseph Weber, the founder of gravitational-wave astronomy. According to him, he managed to catch them with the help of a resonant detector - a mechanical gravitational antenna.
Although none of the subsequent experiments confirmed Weber's message, it caused a rapid growth of work in this direction in many countries.
Among the experimenters was and.
Gravitational waves were detected on September 14, 2015 at the LIGO facilities, a laser-interferometric gravitational-wave observatory. The signal came from the merger of two black holes with masses of 36 and 29 solar masses at a distance of about 1.3 billion light-years from Earth. In a fraction of a second, about three solar masses turned into gravitational waves, the maximum radiation power of which was about 50 times greater than from the entire visible Universe.
Scientists announced the discovery on February 11, 2016, it was made during the engineering cycle of equipment operation (calibration work). This means that the detection of gravitational waves occurred before the scientific launch.
And in June 2016, it became about the second case of registration of gravitational waves, they were detected by two LIGO detectors at once on December 26, 2015.
In contrast to the signal registered during the first detection of gravitational waves, which was clearly visible against the noise background, the second signal was weaker and was not clearly visible. After analyzing the nature of the smallest fluctuations of the test masses of the detectors, the scientists concluded that
that the detected gravitational waves were again generated by two black holes, this time lighter - masses of 14 and 8 solar masses.
If the first detection of gravitational waves confirmed the prediction of general relativity made in 1915, then the registration of two signals within four months of the first cycle of observations of the Advanced LIGO detectors will predict how often gravitational wave signals will be detected in the future.
The LIGO project was founded in 1992, and the observatory began observations in 2002.
“Kip Thorne of Caltech and Rainer Weiss of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology organized a consortium of two of the largest universities in the United States, received funding from the US National Science Foundation. After some time, when it became clear that even the United States would not be able to pull off such a project, there was a unification of international efforts,” Gorodetsky explained.
Today, the collaboration includes more than a thousand scientists from universities in 15 countries. Russia is represented by two research teams: a group Faculty of Physics Moscow state university them. M.V. Lomonosov and a group of the Institute of Applied Physics in Nizhny Novgorod e.
The founder of the Moscow group LIGO was Russian physicist Vladimir Braginsky, in March 2016.
From the very beginning, the main efforts were aimed at increasing the sensitivity of gravitational-wave detectors, determining the fundamental quantum and thermodynamic limitations of sensitivity, and developing new measurement methods. Theoretical and experimental studies Russian scientists were embodied in the creation of detectors that made it possible to directly observe gravitational waves from the merger of two black holes.
Currently, the team of the scientific group of Moscow University is actively involved in the development of the next generation of gravitational wave detectors, which will replace the current detectors and provide a significant increase in their sensitivity, which will allow detecting gravitational wave signals almost daily.
Weiss, Thorn and Barish were considered among the main contenders for the Nobel Prize last year, but they announced the discovery too late - accepting applications only until January 31.
The most likely contenders for the Nobel Prize in Physics were Mitchell Feigenbaum for discoveries in the field of nonlinear and chaotic systems, the Russian astrophysicist for his profound contribution to the understanding of the Universe, and Phaedon Avoris, Paul McEwan and Cornelis Dekker, who made significant contributions to research carbon nanotubes, graphene, graphene nanoribbons and their use in electronics.
In 2016, the Nobel Prize winners are scientists James Thouless from the University of Washington, Frederick Haldane from Princeton and from Brown University for the development of the science of topological phase transitions.
Prizes awarded to American scientists Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish
American scientist Rainer Weiss
Moscow. October 3rd. website - American scientists received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017: Rainer Weiss, professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Kip Thorne and Barry Barish, professors of physics at the California Institute of Technology, with the wording "for their decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and for the observation of gravitational waves."
Weiss (85), Thorne (77) and Barish (81) have been considered the top contenders for the Nobel Prize in Physics since the discovery of gravitational waves in 2016 by the LIGO and VIRGO collaborations.
The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 3, 2017
LIGO consists of two gravitational observatories located 3 thousand km apart - one near Livingston (Louisiana), the other - near Hanford (Washington).
Laser interferometers are assembled according to the L-scheme and consist of two perpendicular optical arms. Their length is four kilometers. As N+1 explains, the laser beam is split into two components that travel through the pipes, bounce off their ends, and recombine. If the arm length has changed, the nature of the interference between the beams changes, which is fixed by the detectors. The large distance between the observatories makes it possible to see the difference in the arrival time of gravitational waves - from the assumption that the latter propagate at the speed of light, the arrival time difference reaches 10 milliseconds.
Physics Prize - 2016
Last year, the Nobel Prize in Physics went to David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz "for their theoretical discoveries in the topological phases of matter." Topology is a branch of mathematics that studies the properties of geometric objects that are preserved under continuous transformations. Theoretical substantiation in topological transitions can help in the future to create quantum computer and is related to quantum physical phenomena.
Medicine Award - 2017
Earlier on Monday, October 2, the winners of the Nobel Prize for. The winners were US scientists Geoffrey Hall, Michael Rozbash and Michael Young. They received an award for studying the molecular mechanisms that regulate the body's circadian rhythms. These are daily fluctuations of various parameters of the body, characteristic of almost all living beings.
Researchers independently discovered on the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster the period gene and protein, the concentration of which fluctuates every 24 hours and determines the work of the "biological clock" of the animal.
Nobel Prize winners in 2017 9 million SEK (about $1.12 million). For the first time since 2001, the Nobel Foundation decided to increase the amount of prizes for laureates by 12.5%. Previously, the winners received 8 million Swedish kronor (about $931,000).
Adjusted for inflation, the amount of 9 million crowns slightly exceeds the first prize paid in 1901 (109%). The total invested capital of the Nobel Foundation at the end of December 2016 was 1.73 billion crowns.
The official presentation of prizes and medals will take place in December 2017.
