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Comment by klogw | Hacker News Reader

This interview with Rana X Adhikari from Caltech who is involved with LIGO does give a perspective on the technical difficulties in carrying out such precise measurements and eliminating noise: https://blog.ycombinator.com/the-technical-challenges-of-mea...

Also to me, it seems that Barry Barish got his share of the Nobel more as he was the leader of the LIGO project and less due to his direct involvement with some experimental or theoretical work as is the case with most Nobel prize. Am I wrong in saying that? Also if this is true then has this occurred in past also when someone was awarded a Nobel prize more because of their leadership in starting a project or an institution then their direct involvement with the actual work?

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One could argue that the 1984 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the W and Z Bosons, given to Carlo Rubbia, was more for his leadership of the UA1 Collaboration at CERN. His co-winner, van der Meers, actually developed the technology to make colliding protons and anti-protons possible. The theory behind the W and Z was already given a Nobel Prize in 1979.

EDIT: Rubbia is an interesting character in himself that some have said was a bit of an egomaniac and obsessed with getting a Nobel prize for himself. For a highly entertaining biography on him, as well as a look into the academic politics of a place like CERN, I recommend "Nobel Dreams" by Gary Taubes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._C._George_Sudarshan

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2010/aug/10/diracs-...

George Sudarshan was nominated about 5 times and never got it.

The idea of using laser interferometer for detecting gravitational waves was first proposed in 1962 (shortly after inventing lasers) by M. Gertsenshtein and V. Pustovoit [1]. So it took more than 50 years from the idea to its implementation.

[1] http://www.jetp.ac.ru/cgi-bin/dn/r_043_0605.pdf (in Russian, Abstract in English at the end).

I'm very interested in this question. In the age of massive physical collaborations, it is an oft-debated question whether the Nobel committee should be awarding the prizes to the collaborations themselves and/or the leaders thereof. I don't know anything about Barish's history.

Don't the original rules stipulate that at most three people can share a price?

I think that was added later.

Such a rule probably wouldn't have seemed necessary before the rise of big physics during WWII.

one of the top candidates for the ligo nobel prize would have been ronald drever, but he unfortunately died earlier this year.

Thank you for the link! A quote from the interview:

> The wave comes to us and by the time it gets to us, because it’s billions of light years, the squeezing and stretching is much less than 500%. It’s more like a part in 10 to the 21 or 22. So that means if you have a, the whole earth for example is about 10,000 kilometers in size, and so the whole earth will be only stretching by about 100th of a micron. I don’t even know how to imagine that.

Yes, and LIGO itself is stretching/squeezing about a thousandth of the diameter of a proton!

William Shockley.

"Co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in physics in 1956, along with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. In his Nobel lecture, he gave full credit to Brattain and Bardeen as the inventors of the point-contact transistor."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley#Honors

If I'm not mistaken, he invented the predecessor of the Bipolar Junction Transistor, which was the type that was actually commercialized.

Barry created the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) and was instrumental in getting the collaboration to cohere and coordinate.

Perhaps, but I expect you become a leader of such a project only after you've already accomplished a lot.

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