The award of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics to the US based team who recently directly observed gravitational waves, confirms the importance of work carried out over fifty years ago by researchers at King’s, broadening our understanding of the universe.

The award of the  2017 Nobel Prize in Physics to the US based team who recently directly observed gravitational waves, confirms the importance of work carried out over fifty years ago by  researchers at King’s, broadening our understanding of the universe.

Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves in 1916, but he later became uncertain and made arguments against their existence. This resulted in the field languishing until the mid-1950’s when theoretical physicists, especially members of the  King’s relativity group,  led by Sir Hermann Bondi and Professor Felix Pirani, in the mathematics department made significant advances.

In the late 1950’s and early 1960’s Pirani, Bondi, and colleagues, plus students and visitors at King’s, overcame the theoretical obstacles to the existence of gravitational waves in a series of seminal research papers predicting the existence of gravitational waves and the transfer of energy by gravitational radiation.

On 14 September 2015, the universe’s gravitational waves, emanating from a collision between two black holes, were directly observed for the first time. It took 1.3 billion years for the waves to arrive at the  LIGO detector in the USA.

The Nobel prize report on the scientific background makes extensive references to the work of Bondi and Pirani. Earlier this year, Professors  George Papadopoulos  and Peter West at King’s held a conference on  modern developments in general relativity and their  historical roots  which included  lectures  that explained how our understanding of General Relativity had evolved,  including  the key contributions of Bondi and Pirani and the research group at Kings.

Professor Peter West FRS said ‘The Noble committee acknowledged Hermann Bondi and Felix Pirani’s work which was crucial in transforming our conceptual understanding of Einstein’s theory of general relativity into one in which one could reliably calculate physical quantities that could be measured. As a result they directly inspired the search for gravitational waves.’

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