Professor Ron Drever
Gravitational wave expert who helped to confirm Einstein
PROFESSOR RON DREVER, who has died aged 85, was a Scottish physicist who made a vital contribution to the detection, in 2015, of gravitational waves in outer space, an achievement which confirmed a major prediction of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
Gravitational waves – ripples in the fabric of space-time sent out when two black holes merge in a massive collision – were first predicted by Einstein in 1915, and the dramatic announcement that they had been detected for the first time was hailed as the greatest discovery in astrophysics since the Higgs boson. Those involved, including Drever, were tipped for the Nobel Prize.
Drever had begun looking for gravitational waves in 1970 while doing postdoctoral research at Glasgow University, where he worked on early prototypes of a machine, known as an interferometer, that could detect the waves using laser beams bouncing between mirrors. By 1978 Drever had built a prototype more than twice the size of any previous device.
In 1979 he was recruited to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) as a professor of physics to found a research group in gravitational-wave experiments. There, in collaboration with John Hall, he described a new means of stabilising the frequency of the laser light by bouncing it back and forth in a special set of precisely situated mirrors – a technique which became known as the Pound-drever-hall approach and which would prove vital to the success of the gravitational wave programme.
In 1984 his group teamed up with two other scientific teams to create Ligo (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) and they went on to collaborate on the construction, at a cost of $1.1bn, of the vast machine, consisting of two huge interferometers in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, that would eventually confirm Einstein’s prediction.
The project, however, was dogged by personality differences, in which Drever’s intuitive seat-ofthe-pants style clashed with some of his colleagues’ more analytic approaches. “Ron was an imaginative physicist who thought primarily in pictures,’’ one colleague recalled. “Often the pictures gave him an elegant way to circumvent a lot of analytic reasoning.’’
In 1992 Drever was banned from meetings and at one stage his office door was bricked up to prevent his coming in. Although he was subsequently given his own laboratory, he was no longer seen as part of the project, though he later served on a network devoted to analysing data from Ligo. He returned home to Scotland in 2010.
The oldest son of a country doctor, Ronald William Prest Drever was born in Bishopton, Renfrewshire, on October 26 1931 and educated at Glasgow Academy, where he excelled in mathematics and science. As a boy, in 1953 he built a television set out of junk from the family garage and war surplus items, on which the family watched the Queen’s coronation.
After taking a BSC at Glasgow University, he stayed on to do a PHD, went on to work at the university as a professor and made a makeshift device out of old car batteries and wires to test whether the rotation of the Milky Way would affect the properties of atomic nuclei in a jar (the answer was no). The experiment, now known as the Hughes-drever experiment, caught the attention of Professor Robert Pound at Harvard and he joined him for a time as a research fellow.
Drever served as vicepresident of the Royal Astronomical Society and was elected to fellowships of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Physical Society, which awarded him the Einstein Prize.
He was unmarried.
Professor Ron Drever, born October 26 1931, died March 7 2017