Chauvin and Richard R. Schrock; David Politzer, recipient of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics with David J. Gross and Frank Wilczek; Rudy Marcus, sole winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Chemistry; and David Baltimore, winner of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, with Renato Dulbecco and Howard M. Temin.
In 2016, Drever, Thorne, and Weiss won the Kavli Prize in Astrophysics, the Shaw Prize in Astronomy, the Gruber Foundation Cosmology Prize, and the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. In 2017, Barish, Thorne, and Weiss won the Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research and the European Physical Society's Giuseppe and Vanna Cocconi Prize.
Barish was born on January 27, 1936, in Omaha, Nebraska, and spent his childhood in Los Angeles. He received his BA in physics in 1957 and his PhD in experimental particle physics in 1962, both from UC Berkeley. In 1963, he joined Caltech as a research fellow. He became an assistant professor in 1966, an associate professor in 1969, and a professor of physics in 1972. He was named the Ronald and Maxine Linde Professor of Physics in 1991 and Linde Professor, Emeritus, in 2005. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Physical Society, the latter of which he served as president. In 2002, he received the Klopsteg Memorial Lecture Award from the American Association of Physics Teachers and, in 2016, he received the Enrico Fermi Prize from the Italian Physical Society. He won the Henry Draper Medal in 2017 with Whitcomb. For a full biography, click here.
Thorne was born on June 1, 1940, in Logan, Utah. He received a bachelor's degree in physics from Caltech in 1962 and a PhD in physics from Princeton University in 1965. He joined Caltech as a research fellow in 1966, and joined the faculty in 1967 as an associate professor of theoretical physics. In 1970, he became a professor of theoretical physics. In 1991, he was named the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics. He retired in 2009. Thorne has coauthored or authored several books, including Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy, published in 1994. He served as an executive producer and science adviser for the 2014 film Interstellar. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Physical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. On October 11, 2017, Thorne will publish the textbook Modern Classical Physics, coauthored with Roger Blandford. For a full biography, click here.
More information about LIGO's many partners is online here.
Senior Media Relations Manager
Senior Content and Media Strategist
MIT Press Release
CONTACT: Kimberly Allen, MIT News Office
email@example.com; 617.253.2702 or 617.852.6094 (mobile)
MIT Media Relations
MIT Physicist Rainer Weiss Shares Nobel Prize in Physics
Rainer Weiss ’55, PhD ’62, professor emeritus of physics at MIT, has won the Nobel Prize in physics for 2017. Weiss wins half the prize, sharing the other half of the award with Kip S. Thorne, professor emeritus of theoretical physics at Caltech, and Barry C. Barish, professor emeritus of physics at Caltech.
The Nobel Foundation, in its announcement this morning, cited the physicists "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves.”
“We are immensely proud of Rai Weiss, and we also offer admiring best wishes to his chief collaborators and the entire LIGO team,” says MIT President L. Rafael Reif. “The creativity and rigor of the LIGO experiment constitute a scientific triumph; we are profoundly inspired by the decades of ingenuity, optimism, and perseverance that made it possible. It is especially sweet that Rai Weiss not only served on the MIT faculty for 37 years, but is also an MIT graduate. Today’s announcement reminds us, on a grand scale, of the value and power of fundamental scientific research and why it deserves society’s