Nobel prize

A little more than a hundred years ago, Albert Einstein worked out a consequence of his new theory of gravity: Much like waves traveling through water, ripples can undulate through space and time, distorting the fabric of the universe itself.

Today, Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne were awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for decades of work that culminated in the detection of gravitational waves in 2015—and several times since—by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).

Emily and Chris sat down with UMD physics professor Peter Shawhan, a member of the LIGO collaboration, to learn more about gravitational waves and hear a sliver of the story behind this year's Nobel Prize.

This episode of Relatively Certain was produced by Chris Cesare and Emily Edwards. It features music by Dave Depper. Relatively Certain is a production of the Joint Quantum Institute, a research partnership between the University of Maryland and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and you can find it on iTunes, Google Play or Soundcloud.

JQI would like to congratulate this years recipients, Peter Higgs and François Englert. The Nobel committee citation read that they were jointly awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.”

Here is a helpful excerpt from the "Popular Information" released by the Nobel Prize website:

Solving the mystery of blackbody radiation brings on the quantum revolution. Phil Schewe, Emily Edwards, and Steve Rolston discuss this pivotal moment for modern physics. 2006 Nobel Prize laureate John Mather discusses how his work relates to blackbody radiation.

The Joint Quantum Institute would like to again congratulate the 2012 Nobel Prize in physics recipients, David Wineland and Serge Haroche. The Nobel Prize committee cites Wineland and Haroche “for ground-breaking experimental methods that enable measuring and manipulation of individual quantum systems.” The awards were bestowed during the ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, 2012.