3 US experts win Physics Nobel

Prize cites finding of ripples in fabric of universe

STOCKHOLM, Oct 3, (Agencies): Three scientists on Tuesday won a Nobel Physics Prize for their roles in detecting faint ripples flying through the universe — gravitational waves predicted a century ago by Albert Einstein that provide a new understanding of the universe.

Sweden’s Royal Academy of Sciences announced that the winners are Rainer Weiss of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Barry Barish and Kip Thorne of the California Institute of Technology.

The three were key to the first observation of gravitational waves in September 2015. When the discovery was announced several months later, it was a sensation not only among scientists but the general public.

The scientists were honored for a combination of highly advanced theory and ingenious equipment design.

“It’s a win for the human race as a whole. These gravitational waves will be powerful ways for the human race to explore the universe,” said Thorne, speaking by phone with The Associated Press from California shortly after the announcement.

Impossible

Ariel Goobar of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the winners’ work meant “we can study processes which were completely impossible, out of reach to us in the past.”

“The best comparison is when Galileo discovered the telescope, which allowed us to see that Jupiter had moons and all of a sudden we discovered that the universe was much vaster than we used to think about,” Goobar said.

With the technology that the three developed “We may even see entirely new objects that we haven’t even imagined yet,” said Patrick Sutton, an astronomer at Cardiff University in Wales.

Weiss, in a phone call with the announcement news conference at the Swedish academy, said “I view this

about this.”

The life-giving potential of these socalled “warm little ponds” was raised by the famed biologist Charles Darwin, who developed the theory of evolution, in a letter to a friend in 1871.

“But if (and oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity et cetera more as a thing that recognizes the work of a thousand people.”

Gravitational waves are extremely faint ripples in the fabric of space and time, generated by some of the most violent events in the universe.

The waves detected by the laureates came from the collision of two black holes some 1.3 billion light-years away. A light-year is about 5.88 trillion miles.

The waves were predicted by Einstein a century ago as part of his theory of general relativity. General relativity says that gravity is caused by heavy objects bending space-time, which itself is the four-dimensional way that astronomers see the universe.

The prize is “a win for Einstein, and a very big one,” Barish told the AP.

The German-born Weiss was awarded half of the 9-million-kronor ($1.1 million) prize amount and Thorne and Barish will split the other half.

Weiss in the 1970s designed a laserbased device that would detect gravitational waves. He, Thorne and Barish “ensured that four decades of effort led to gravitational waves finally being observed,” the Nobel announcement said.

The laser device, called an interferometer, must be both exquisitely precise and extremely stable. “The beam must hit the mirrors precisely. They should hardly shake at all, not even when leaves fall from nearby trees,” according to a prize background paper.

The announcement said Einstein was convinced that gravitational waves could never be measured. The laureates used laser devices “to measure a change thousands of times smaller than an atomic nucleus.”

In a moment of poetry aimed at making the distant and infinitesimal phenomenon understandable to non-experts, the academy announcement said gravitational waves “are always created when a mass accelerates, like when an ice-skater pirouettes or a pair of black holes rotate around each other.”

For the past 25 years, the physics

present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes,” he wrote at the time.

Since then, researchers have debated whether life emerged in ponds, or in hydrothermal vents along the ocean floor.

The latest study finds ponds were far more likely, because a cycle from wet to dry was needed to bond basic molecular prize has been shared among multiple winners.

Last year’s prize went to three British-born researchers who applied the mathematical discipline of topology to help understand the workings of exotic matter such as superconductors and superfluids.

Messing with your body’s clock is dangerous business, in fact it could make you sick — or worse.

The inner timekeeper dubbed the “circadian clock”, governs the daynight cycle that guides sleep and eating patterns, hormones and even body temperature. It is important enough that the Nobel Medicine Prize was awarded on Monday to three US scientists whose work illuminated the fundamentals of how it ticks.

The trio identified genes that regulate the clock, and the mechanism by which light can synchronise it.

Yet humans have a long history of overriding the circadian-driven need for sleep, Russell Foster, a professor of circadian neuroscience at Oxford University told AFP — the most obvious example being night work.

Such tinkering with Mother Nature can have serious consequences ranging from impulsive behaviour to lifethreatening conditions such as obesity and cancer, the experts say.

Just look at the poor health records of shift workers such as nurses or factory labourers.

The World Health Organization has already raised the red flag, with a 2007 report noting that “circadian disruption” is “probably carcinogenic” — which means cancer-causing.

The trouble is that the human body never really adapts to operating outside the normal cycle of working by day, and sleeping at night.

Like everyone else, shift workers’ biological clocks are set by the rising and setting of the Sun — not their work schedule.

building blocks in the ponds into self-replicating ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecules. (AFP)

Vanuatu threat recedes:

A Vanuatu volcano that sparked the evacuation of an entire island appeared to be stabilising, scientists said Tuesday, although aid workers said it was too early for villagers to return home.

All 11,000 people who live on Ambae, in the north of the Pacific archipelago, were ordered to leave after the Manaro Voui volcano rumbled to life and rained rock and ash on villages last week.

Fearing a major eruption, officials mobilised a rag-tag armada of civilian vessels to ferry residents to safety on other islands in what has been described as a “Dunkirk” style operation.

Vanuatu’s official Geohazards Observatory said the threat had eased, although it maintained the volcano’s status as level four, the second-highest rating.

It said the most recent observations from flyovers and seismic stations indicated the seismic activity was now limited to a lake in the volcano’s crater.

“As the activity is now more settled and focused only on the new island in Lake Voui, the possibility of a large eruption affecting the whole island is now looking less likely,” it said.

Red Cross spokesman Joe Cropp said the report of reduced seismic activity was “reassuring” but there were still thousands of people in emergency accommodation.

Locals can only return to Ambae when the government downgrades the threat to level three, which could take months, he said. (AFP)