Albert Einstein had guessed it with the famous formula E = mc2 and the matter of general relativity at the dawn of the 2017th century but the demonstration came in XNUMX and earned the Nobel prize for three scientists who managed to demonstrate the discovery of gravitational waves : Kip Thorne, Barry Barish and Rainer Weiss. The Swedish Academy of Sciences also mentioned the international collaborations Ligo and Virgo. The latter are the unanimous result of a research born from the participation of 1.500 physicists from all over the world, at least 200 of whom are Italian. From an Italian idea, of the physicist Adalberto Giazotto, the Virgo detector was born, built in the countryside near Pisa, in Cascina. Born from the idea launched in the mid-80s by Giazotto and Alain Brillet, Virgo is part of the European Gravitational Observatory (Ego), founded in 2000 by Italy, with the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (Infn) and the France, with the National Scientific Research Council CNRS. Hence the enormous satisfaction of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics at the announcement of the award of the Nobel and the mention of Ligo and Virgo.
Half of the Nobel prize goes to Rainer Weiss, while the other half was jointly awarded to Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne "for the decisive contribution to the LIGO detector and to the observation of gravitational waves". For all three winners, the Nobel Foundation has indicated the Ligo-Virgo collaborations as affiliation.
Weiss (85 years old), was born in 1932 in Berlin. He received his doctorate in 1962 in the United States at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he continued to teach.
Barish (81 years old) was born in 1936 in the United States, in Omaha. After his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, he taught at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
Thorne (77 years old) was born in the United States, in Logan. He studied at Princeton University and held the chair of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He became famous for the general public after his scientific consultancy for the film Interstellar.
Emotion and concussion, a big hug to Infn
A huge applause and a toast welcomed the news of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of gravitational waves at the Infn headquarters in Rome, "This time the globality of science has been rewarded", said the director of the Observatory Gravitational European (Ego), Federico Ferrini, dedicating the toast to the father of the Virgo detector, Adalberto Giazotto.
