Physics Prize Laureates of the Year. Nobel Prize in Physics awarded for gravitational waves
Let's talk about this in more detail and name those who have received the most prestigious world scientific and cultural prize, which has been awarded since the beginning of the twentieth century.
Physics: Kip Thorne, Rainer Weiss and Barry Barrish
The prize went to scientists for the creation of a laser-interferometric gravitational-wave observatory, the work of which helped confirm the existence of cosmic gravitational waves.
Until now, our knowledge about them has not been confirmed by experiment, although Albert Einstein spoke about their existence a hundred years ago. Well, he was right and now it's official!
MEDICINE and Physiology: Geoffrey Hall, Michael Rozbash and Michael Young
This year, the medical field celebrated the discovery of “molecular mechanisms that control circadian rhythms.” This refers to those mechanisms that control fluctuations in the activity of living organisms at different times of the day. Researchers have discovered a gene responsible for circadian rhythms.
The experimental subjects were fruit flies, beloved by geneticists, known for their rapid reproduction and having already made a significant contribution to many discoveries related to the transmission of hereditary information.
Chemistry: Richard Henderson, Jochaim Frank, Jacques Dubochet
Chemists have won an award for developing cryo-electron microscopy to determine the structure of molecules at high resolution in solution. This type of research allows you to study the structure of biomolecules and create their images in 3D.
On the official Twitter of the Nobel Prize diagram posted, which illustrates how this process occurs.
Literature: Kazuo Ishiguro
The British writer of Japanese origin received the prize for the fact that in his works, in the words of the Nobel committee, he “revealed the abyss under the illusory sense of connection with the world.” Kazuo Ishiguro is the author of the novels “The Remains of the Day,” which tells about the life of an English butler, the psychological dystopia “Never Let Me Go,” as well as other works.
The writer's award evoked a positive reaction from many commentators and critics. It's no secret that the Nobel Prize in Literature regularly sparks debates about political bias. However, in the case of Kazuo Ishiguro, who is deservedly called one of the most talented living British writers, we want to talk much more about the novels themselves.
Last year, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the poet and musician Bob Dylan, who confused the committee and the world public by debating whether to accept the award.
peace prize
The award, which is presented by the Nobel Committee in Oslo for outstanding contributions to world peace, was received by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).
Activists of the movement, which has existed for 10 years, influenced the adoption of UN resolutions related to nuclear disarmament. Among their initiatives is the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which provides for the complete abolition of nuclear warheads. To date, countries that have nuclear weapons have not accepted this initiative.
We remind you that the Doomsday Clock (a project of nuclear physicists created in 1947 to assess the likelihood of nuclear war) is still running. In 2017, after Trump's statements and amid growing nationalist sentiments, the hands were moved forward half a minute. It is now two minutes to midnight on the Doomsday Clock, and this is the worst situation since 1953, when the USSR and the USA tested thermonuclear bombs.
Creator of fertilizers and chemical weapons
One of the most controversial Nobel Prize winners was Fritz Haber. The Chemistry Prize was awarded to him in 1918 for his invention of a method for the synthesis of ammonia, a discovery of crucial importance for the production of fertilizers. However, he is also known as the "father of chemical weapons" due to his work on the poisonous gas chlorine used during the First World War.
Deadly discovery
Another German scientist, Otto Han (pictured center), was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1945 for his discovery of nuclear fission. Although he never worked on the military application of this discovery, it led directly to the development of nuclear weapons. Hahn received the prize several months after nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
From Friedman to Obama: The most controversial Nobel laureates
A breakthrough that was banned
Swiss chemist Paul Müller won a medical prize in 1948 for his discovery that DDT could effectively kill insects that spread diseases such as malaria. The use of pesticides once saved millions of lives. However, later environmentalists began to argue that DDT poses a threat to human health and harms nature. Today its use is prohibited throughout the world.
From Friedman to Obama: The most controversial Nobel laureates
Inconvenient Reward
Because of its overt and implied political overtones, the Peace Prize is perhaps the most controversial of all the Nobel awards. In 1935, German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky received it for exposing Germany's secret rearmament. Ossietzky himself was in prison on charges of treason, and an outraged Hitler accused the committee of interfering in Germany's internal affairs.
From Friedman to Obama: The most controversial Nobel laureates
(Possible) Peace Prize
The Norwegian committee's decision to award the Peace Prize to US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese leader Le Duc Tho in 1973 faced harsh criticism. The Nobel Prize was supposed to be a symbol of recognition of achievements in achieving a ceasefire during the Vietnam War, but Le Duc Tho refused to receive it. The Vietnam War continued for two more years.
From Friedman to Obama: The most controversial Nobel laureates
Libertarian and dictator
Free market advocate Milton Friedman is one of the most controversial recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize in economics. The committee's decision in 1976 sparked international protests because of Friedman's ties to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Friedman actually visited Chile a year earlier, and critics claim his ideas inspired a regime where thousands were tortured and killed.
From Friedman to Obama: The most controversial Nobel laureates
Vain hopes
The Peace Prize, which was shared in 1994 by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, was supposed to serve as an additional incentive for a peaceful resolution of the conflict in the Middle East. Instead, further negotiations failed, and Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli nationalist a year later.
From Friedman to Obama: The most controversial Nobel laureates
Creepy memoirs
Human rights activist Rigoberta Menchú, who defends the interests of the Mayan people, received the Peace Prize in 1992 “for her struggle for social justice.” Subsequently, this decision caused a lot of controversy, as falsifications were allegedly discovered in her memoirs. Her depictions of the atrocities of the genocide of Guatemala's indigenous people made her famous. However, many are convinced that she deserved the award anyway.
From Friedman to Obama: The most controversial Nobel laureates
Premature reward
When Barack Obama was awarded the Peace Prize in 2009, many were surprised, including himself. Having been president for less than a year at the time, he received the award for his “tremendous efforts to strengthen international diplomacy.” Obama's critics and some supporters felt the award was premature and he received it before he had a chance to make any real moves.
From Friedman to Obama: The most controversial Nobel laureates
Posthumous award
In 2011, the Nobel Committee named Jules Hoffman, Bruce Beutler and Ralph Steinman laureates in medicine for their discoveries in the study of the immune system. The problem was that Steinman had died of cancer a few days earlier. According to the rules, the prize is not awarded posthumously. But the committee still awarded it to Steinman, justifying it by the fact that his death was not yet known at that time.
From Friedman to Obama: The most controversial Nobel laureates
"The Greatest Omission"
The Nobel Prize is controversial not only because of who was awarded it, but also because someone never received it. In 2006, Nobel Committee member Geir Lundestad said that "it is undoubtedly the greatest omission in our 106-year history that Mahatma Gandhi never received the Nobel Peace Prize."
Alexander Sergeev explained the essence of the unique discovery
Gravitational waves won a Nobel Prize for their discoverers just a year and a half after their capture was announced. Moreover, all the physicists, whom we did not ask the day before, unanimously predicted the victory of the group of researchers from the international LIGO collaboration. Physicists Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne experimentally proved the existence of gravitational waves. In this list, in my opinion, there should have been another name of our compatriot Vladislav Pustovoit from MSTU. Bauman, because it was precisely according to the method proposed by him and Mikhail Herzenstein from the Research Institute of Nuclear Physics of Moscow State University that the Americans decided to catch gravitational waves. But, alas, Nobel Prizes are almost never awarded for ideas; the main thing is the implementation of these ideas in practice. One of the participants in the LIGO project from the Russian side, the director of the Nizhny Novgorod Institute of Applied Physics, President of the Russian Academy of Sciences Alexander SERGEEV, spoke about the details of the discovery of “MK”.
Gravitational waves are changes in the gravitational field that travel like waves. Their existence was predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916, and was first discovered on September 14, 2015 at LIGO, a laser-interferometer gravitational-wave observatory, by members of an international group that brought together thousands of scientists from 15 countries. 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. Scientists announced the discovery on February 11, 2016.
This achievement was immediately put on a par with the advent of the telescope and announced the entry of humanity into the era of gravitational wave astronomy. The detector with which the waves were caught was called a tool that will allow you to “listen” to the Universe directly, despite the gas and dust clouds.
We are not saying that the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017 was announced “for the discovery” of gravitational waves; after all, the discovery itself was made, as they say, at the tip of his pen by Albert Einstein. We are now talking about experimental confirmation of the existence of gravitational waves,” clarifies the head of the Nizhny Novgorod group of participants in the LIGO experiment, President of the Russian Academy of Sciences Alexander Sergeev. - If we talk about the importance of this work, it is certainly a triumph of humanity. For a long time, theorists have been exploring the possibility of the emergence of gravitational waves: either as a result of star merger processes, or as a result of supernova explosions... The possibilities of their detection here on earth were certainly assessed.
One of the most important circumstances on the path to a successful experiment was the demonstration of the first laser in 1960. Scientists realized that laser radiation has important properties in order to use it to detect gravitational waves. In 1962, an article by two Soviet scientists Mikhail Herzenstein and Vladislav Pustovoit appeared, who proposed this scheme. Their theoretical article was the forerunner of what the Americans did later. Therefore, we can rightfully assume that the ideological priority associated with the capture of gravitational waves belongs to our scientists. The now living academician Vladislav Ivanovich Pustovoit certainly deserves to be among the Nobel laureates. Well, if we talk about those who received the Nobel Prize, I also know them well. This is Barry Barish - a very interesting person who came to the project from accelerator physics (he was one of the leaders in the creation of the Texas Collider). When the collider program was closed in the 90s, the Americans very shrewdly sent a team of supercollider builders to create an installation for detecting gravitational waves. Two friends of scientists, Rainer Weiss and Kip Thorne, have been working in the field of studying gravitational waves for a long time and are its pioneers. When the Russian Academy of Sciences, represented by the Nizhny Novgorod Institute of Applied Physics, entered the LIGO collaboration in 1997, it was these two researchers who provided us with great friendly support. It should be noted that in addition to our institute, a group of employees from Moscow State University also participated in the LIGO project. Therefore, among the co-authors of the work, there are, of course, some Russian scientists. Although, unfortunately, this part was not decisive.
Our entire understanding of the processes occurring in the Universe, ideas about its structure, were formed on the basis of the study of electromagnetic radiation, in other words, photons of all possible energies reaching our instruments from the depths of space. But photon observations have their limitations: electromagnetic waves of even the highest energies do not reach us from too distant areas of space.
There are other forms of radiation - neutrino streams and gravitational waves. They can tell you about things that instruments that record electromagnetic waves will never see. In order to “see” neutrinos and gravitational waves, fundamentally new instruments are needed. Three American physicists, Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne and Barry Barrish, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics this year for the creation of a gravitational wave detector and experimental proof of their existence.
From left to right: Rainer Weiss, Barry Barrish and Kip Thorne.
The existence of gravitational waves is provided for by the general theory of relativity and was predicted by Einstein back in 1915. They arise when very massive objects collide with each other and generate disturbances in space-time, diverging at the speed of light in all directions from the point of origin.
Even if the event that generated the wave is huge - for example, two black holes colliding - the effect that the wave has on space-time is extremely small, so it is difficult to register it, which requires very sensitive instruments. Einstein himself believed that a gravitational wave, passing through matter, affects it so little that it cannot be observed. Indeed, the actual effect that a wave has on matter is quite difficult to capture, but indirect effects can be registered. This is exactly what American astrophysicists Joseph Taylor and Russell Hulse did in 1974, measuring the radiation of the double pulsar star PSR 1913+16 and proving that the deviation of its pulsation period from the calculated one is explained by the loss of energy carried away by a gravitational wave. For this they received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1993.
On September 14, 2015, LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, directly detected a gravitational wave for the first time. By the time the wave reached the Earth, it was very weak, but even this weak signal meant a revolution in physics. To make this possible, it took the work of thousands of scientists from twenty countries who built LIGO.
It took several months to verify the results of the fifteenth year, so they were made public only in February 2016. In addition to the main discovery - confirmation of the existence of gravitational waves - there were several more hidden in the results: the first evidence of the existence of black holes of average mass (20−60 solar) and the first evidence that they can merge.
It took the gravitational wave more than a billion years to reach Earth. Far, far away, beyond our galaxy, two black holes crashed into each other, 1.3 billion years passed - and LIGO told us about this event.
The energy of a gravitational wave is enormous, but the amplitude is incredibly small. Feeling it is like measuring the distance to a distant star with an accuracy of tenths of a millimeter. LIGO is capable of this. Weiss developed the concept: back in the 70s, he calculated what terrestrial phenomena could distort the results of observations and how to get rid of them. LIGO consists of two observatories, the distance between which is 3002 kilometers. A gravitational wave travels this distance in 7 milliseconds, so two interferometers refine each other’s readings as the wave passes.
The two LIGO observatories, in Livingston (Louisiana) and Hanford (Washington State), are located 3002 km apart.
Each observatory has two four-kilometer arms emanating from the same point at right angles to each other. Inside they have an almost perfect vacuum. At the beginning and end of each arm there is a complex system of mirrors. Passing through our planet, a gravitational wave slightly compresses the space where one arm is laid, and stretches the second (without a wave, the length of the arms is strictly the same). A laser beam is fired from the crosshairs of the shoulders, split in two and reflected on the mirrors; Having passed their distance, the rays meet at the crosshairs. If this happens simultaneously, then space-time is calm. And if one of the rays took longer to pass through the shoulder than the other, it means that the gravitational wave lengthened its path and shortened the path of the second ray.
Operation diagram of the LIGO observatory.
LIGO was developed by Weiss (and, of course, his colleagues), Kip Thorne - the world's leading expert in the theory of relativity - performed the theoretical calculations, Barry Barish joined the LIGO team in 1994 and turned a small - just 40 people - group of enthusiasts into a huge international collaboration LIGO/VIRGO, thanks to the well-coordinated work of its participants, a fundamental experiment was made possible, carried out twenty years later.
Work on gravitational wave detectors continues. The first recorded wave was followed by a second, third and fourth; the latter was “caught” not only by LIGO detectors, but also by the recently launched European VIRGO. The fourth gravitational wave, unlike the previous three, was born not in absolute darkness (as a result of the merger of black holes), but with complete illumination - during the explosion of a neutron star; Space and ground-based telescopes also detected an optical source of radiation in the area from which the gravitational wave came.
The 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics will be awarded to Rainer Weiss, Barry K. Barysh and Kip S. Thorne. On Tuesday, October 3, the Nobel Committee of the Institute announced the laureates.
The 2017 Nobel laureates in physics were Rainer Weiss, Barry K. Barysh, and Kip S. Thorne for the detection of gravitational waves by the LIGO detector.
LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) is a collaboration of more than 1,000 researchers from more than 20 countries.
On September 14, 2015, gravitational waves of the Universe, which Albert Einstein spoke about 100 years ago, were discovered for the first time. The waves appeared as a result of the collision of two black holes. It took 1.3 billion years for the waves to arrive at the LIGO detector in the United States.
Experimental confirmation of Albert Einstein's theory of gravitational waves was announced in February 2016. 100 years ago, Eintstein described in his theory of relativity that gravitational waves travel at the speed of light, filling the Universe, but he could not imagine that they could be measured. American physicists used a laser for the first time to measure the length of four-kilometer tunnels, which decreased and increased under the influence of gravitational waves.
What is the revolution?
A press release from the Nobel Committee notes that so far all types of electromagnetic radiation have been used to explore the Universe. However, “gravitational waves are direct evidence of the existence of discontinuities in the space-time plane.” “This is something completely new and different, it opens up invisible worlds. “Many discoveries await those who achieve success in the study of gravitational waves and interpret their message,” the Nobel committee said in its conclusion.
David Thouless, Duncan Haldana and Michael Kosterlitz "for their theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter." Scientists have been studying "strange" states of matter.
As you know, Nobel Week started in Stockholm on October 2. The committee named the names on Monday. They were Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rozbash and Michael Young. Scientists will receive the award for "the discovery of the molecular mechanisms that control circadian rhythms." We are talking about cyclical 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 5. The winner of the Peace Prize will be announced on October 6. On October 9, the Nobel Committee will award the Swedish National Bank Prize in Economic Sciences to the memory of Alfred Nobel.
