Briton’s team wins Nobel Prize months after his death

THE Nobel Prize for Physics has been awarded to a team of physicists who detected gravitational waves in space.

The £831,000 prize was awarded to Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne from the California Institute of Technology, all members of the Ligo team, which was co-founded by the late Scottish physicist Ronald Drever.

Prof Drever, who was pivotal in the project to detect and prove one of the consequences of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, died in April after losing a battle with dementia.

He invented some of the key features of a complex machine that picked up the first evidence of ripples in space-time in 2015.

Prof John Drever, his nephew, from Goldsmiths, University of London, said: “Ronald was very much a scientist and focused on the goal of the project, and the discovery of gravitational waves within his lifetime was the perfect reward,” he said.

The existence of gravitational waves was predicted by Einstein more than 100 years ago, and occur when huge objects such as black holes collide, sending shock waves across the universe that stretch both time and space.

A billion years ago, two black holes smashed together in a cataclysmic impact that released 50 times more energy than all the stars combined.

On Sept 14 2015 the ripple created by that collision finally arrived on Earth and was picked up as a “chirp” by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, (Ligo), the world’s most powerful detector.

The recording was hailed as the biggest scientific breakthrough of the century by scientists.