Rainer Weiss of MIT and Barry Barish and Kip Thorne of Caltech are to be awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics “for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on 3 October. Weiss will receive half the prize of 9 million Swedish krona, roughly $1.1 million; Barish and Thorne will split the other half.
Weiss and Thorne, along with the late Ronald Drever, cofounded LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory—a pair of L-shaped Michelson interferometers in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington. Barish became the leader of LIGO in 1994 and helped the collaboration steer through the obstacle course of planning and executing a high-risk, high-reward Big Science project.
On 14 September 2015, nearly a half century after Weiss conceived of the basic experimental design, LIGO made the first direct detection of gravitational waves, which were emitted by...
