Imagine placing a heavy ball in the middle of a large sheet which is being held taut. The ball will warp the sheet, creating a dent. An object placed close to the ball will fall towards it because of the dent. Similarly, the objects in the Universe also create “dents” or distortions in the fabric of space and time. Since these masses are also constantly in motion and spinning around each other, they send out ripples through spacetime. Lighter masses that come near the heavy mass will fall towards it. These ripples are called “gravitational waves”.
Vor mehr als hundert Jahren, im Jahr 1915, schlug Albert Einstein vor, dass große Massen im Raum die Fähigkeit haben, Raum und Zeit zu verzerren oder zu krümmen, eine Theorie, die bis gestern eine Theorie blieb.
Am 3. Oktober 2017 wurde der Nobelpreis für Physik ausgezeichnet wurde an das Team, das die Gravitationswellen entdeckt und aufgezeichnet hat. Rainer Weiss vom Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) sowie Barry Barish und Kip Thorne vom California Institute of Technology (Caltech) sind alle Mitglieder des Teams des Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Weiss erhielt die Hälfte des mit 9 Millionen Kronen ($1,1 Millionen) dotierten Preises, während Thorne und Barish sich die andere Hälfte teilen müssen. Ihre Entdeckung gilt als einer der größten wissenschaftlichen Durchbrüche unserer Zeit.
The gravitational waves generated by cosmic events diminish so much in strength by the time they reach the earth that only extremely sensitive detectors such as LIGO’s can pick them up. Though the waves have been detected three times before, on August 14, 2017, a gravitational-wave signal produced by the merging of two black holes was detected jointly by the LIGO detectors in the US (in Louisiana and Washington) and the Virgo detector in Europe (Pisa, Italy).
Die LIGO-Pressemitteilung heißt es,
“The LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo collaboration report the first joint detection of gravitational waves with both the LIGO and Virgo detectors. This is the fourth announced detection of a binary black hole system and the first significant gravitational-wave signal recorded by the Virgo detector, and highlights the scientific potential of a three-detector network of gravitational-wave detectors. ”
Dieser Durchbruch war das Ergebnis einer grenzüberschreitenden Zusammenarbeit zwischen verschiedenen Partnerorganisationen und Labors auf der ganzen Welt. Das von Caltech und MIT betriebene LIGO wird von der US-amerikanischen National Science Foundation (NSF) finanziert und hat für den Bau seiner Detektoren finanzielle Unterstützung aus Australien, Deutschland und dem Vereinigten Königreich erhalten. Das Projekt wurde auch von unterstützt by India, Italy, Spain, Scotland, Korea, Canada, Scotland, the European Union, Hungary and Taiwan, among others. Its Forschung partners are collaborative organizations in themselves, based in Europe, US, Japan and Australia.
As an organization that believes in democratizing access to scientific research, we believe the greatest innovation are the products of cross-border and interdisciplinary collaboration. Recently, we helped an engineer, who was researching Einstein’s gravity, find an Experimentalphysiker to help him visualize spacetime and plot graphs for curved spacetime. Dr. Lester Ingber, an alumni of Caltech, is an acclaimed physicist who is the Principal Investigator (PI) of an NSF-funded supercomputer project. Kolabtree’s global pool of freiberufliche Wissenschaftlerdie vom MIT, Stanford, Harvard usw. kommen, arbeiten an verschiedenen wissenschaftlichen Projekten aus der ganzen Welt und verkörpern den wahren Geist der wissenschaftlichen Zusammenarbeit.
Effective collaboration helps scientists break geographical and financial restrictions, and allows access to skills, knowledge and expertise that would otherwise be unavailable. Making research available, affordable and accessible spurs innovation and development. Who would have thought that Einstein’s idea, now a hundred years old, would finally be realized and win one of the most prestigious awards on this planet?
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