Congratulations to LIGO and the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics laureates

Giulio Prisco
Turing Church
Published in
3 min readOct 3, 2017

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The Nobel Prize in Physics 2017 was awarded to Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne, for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves.

A press release notes that the 2017 Nobel Laureates have, with their enthusiasm and determination, each been invaluable to the success of LIGO:

“Pioneers Rainer Weiss and Kip S. Thorne, together with Barry C. Barish, the scientist and leader who brought the project to completion, ensured that four decades of effort led to gravitational waves finally being observed.”

See also this LIGO announcement and the waves of congratulations from CERN.

Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of spacetime that propagate as predicted by the Einstein’s field equations of General Relativity. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detector, able to measure relative displacements smaller than one-ten-thousandth the diameter of a proton, opened the field of gravitational wave astronomy in 2016 with the first detection of gravitational waves from a distant black hole fusion event. The last detection has been announced a few days ago.

Future gravitational wave astronomy could permit detecting gravitational wave memory: a permanent displacement of spacetime that comes from strong-field, general relativistic effects. Thorne explained in 1998:

“As the gravitational waves from a binary’s coalescence depart from their source, the waves’ energy creates (via the nonlinearity of Einstein’s field equations) a secondary wave called the ‘Christodoulou memory’… Unfortunately, the memory is so weak that in LIGO only advanced interferometers have much chance of detecting and studying it.”

A 2016 paper suggests that advanced LIGO interferometers could, indeed, detect gravitational wave memory. Is this a case of permanent cosmic memory that future scientists could exploit to reconstruct the past and resurrect the dead? OK, a black hole fusion event releases a little bit more energy than you or I, but perhaps gravitational wave memory is a good place to start. Here’s to LIGO!

A profile titled “Kip Thorne: physicist studying time travel tapped for Hollywood film” was published in The Guardian when Thorne become a science consultant for the film “Interstellar,” by Christopher Nolan. As predicted in the profile, the film “[splashed] one of Thorne’s big ideas — traversable wormholes through space and time — across popular culture.” Thorne then wrote a book on “The Science of Interstellar.”

The book shows that Thorne is a highly imaginative scientist, unafraid to consider very speculative ideas that lesser scientists don’t dare touching, such as time travel, interstellar travel through wormholes and “bulk beings” in higher dimensions.

Previous books: Thorne was a co-author of the textbook “Gravitation” (1973) and wrote the popular book “Black Holes & Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy” (1994).

Some inspiring quotes from The Guardian’s profile of Thorne:

“Sending people into space is very important culturally. That’s really the justification. You cannot rationally justify it on the basis of the science and technology we get out of it.”

“Whether you can go back in time is held in the grip of the law of quantum gravity. We are several decades away from a definitive understanding, 20 or 30 years, but it could be sooner than that.”

The son of well-known Utah feminist and Logan resident Alison Thorne, Thorne grew up in a Mormon family in Utah. While describing himself as an atheist, Thorne is open to religion:

“There are large numbers of my finest colleagues who are quite devout and believe in God, ranging from an abstract humanist God to a very concrete Catholic or Mormon God. There is no fundamental incompatibility between science and religion. I happen to not believe in God.”

Image from LIGO.

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Writer, futurist, sometime philosopher. Author of “Tales of the Turing Church” and “Futurist spaceflight meditations.”