The wave researcher appealed to the British who died before the Nobel Prize

The scientist Ronald Drever could not see the moment of gravitational wave research that he participated in.

Ronald Drever, Scottish physicist, who has contributed significantly to the manufacture of gravitational detectors that died in March this year with intellectual decline and unable to witness this moment of research won the Nobel Prize, according to the Telegraph.

Professor Drever will not be sad about missing the award, said John Drever, his grandson."Uncle Ronald is a genuine scientist and is always focused on the project goal, discovering the gravitational wave while alive was the best reward," he said.

Gravitational waves were predicted by Albert Einstein more than 100 years ago. Accordingly, when large objects such as black holes collide, waves will spread across the universe in space-time fields.

Professor Ronald Drever died a few months before the announcement of the 2017 Nobel Prize for Physics. (Photo: Telegraph).

A billion years ago, the terrible collision between two black holes freed up 50 times as much energy as all stars combined. On September 14, 2015, ripples caused by the collision finally reached the Earth and were recorded by the laser interferometer (LIGO), the world's most powerful wave detector. receive. The scientific community praised this event as the biggest breakthrough of the century.

Drever began searching for gravitational waves since 1970, while studying postdoctoral at Glasgow University. He participated in the design of the first prototype of the device, a interferometric interferometer using laser bounces between mirrors. In 1978, Drever built a test version that was twice as big as the previous devices.

"In the 1970s, I worked with Ronald Drever to build one of the first gravitational detectors in the world," recalls Professor James Hough from the Department of Astrophysics at Glasgow University.

In 1979, Drever was invited to the California Institute of Technology as a physics professor and tasked with creating a research team to conduct gravitational wave experiments. His team worked with scientist Rainer Weiss from Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create LIGO in the 1980s.

Rainer Weiss and Barry Barish and Kip Thorne, LIGO team members were honored during the announcement of the 2017 Nobel Prize for Physics, but Ronald Drever missed that noble award.

"Sadly, Ronald Drever, one of the pioneers of gravitational waves, cannot see this groundbreaking discovery gaining great honor , " said Mark Hannam, professor of astrophysics. Cardiff University, share.

"However, he witnessed the moment when people first discovered gravitational waves in 2015, and I know he was extremely emotional," Hannam added.

Drever was president of the Royal Astronomical Society of England, was elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society. He also received the Einstein Prize awarded by the American Physical Society in 2007.

1. Gravitational wave discovery work won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics