Subsequently, Dr. Barish led the international effort to design the International Linear Collider, which could be the next big particle accelerator in the world, if it ever gets built.
Reached by telephone by the Nobel committee, Dr. Weiss said that he considered the award as recognition for the work of about a thousand people over “I hate to say it ― 40 years.”
He added that when the first chirp came on Sept. 14, 2015, “many of us didn’t believe it,” thinking it might be a test signal that had been inserted into the data. It took them two months to convince themselves it was real.
In an interview from his home, Dr. Thorne said that as the resident theorist and evangelist on the project he felt a little embarrassed to get the prize. “It should go to all the people who built the detector or to the members of the LIGO-Virgo Collaboration who pulled off the end game,” he said.
“An enormous amount of rich science is coming out of this,” he added. “For me, an amazing thing is that this has worked out just as I expected when we were starting out back in the 80s. It blows me away that it all come out as I expected.”
Dr. Barish said he had awoken at 2:41 am in California and when the phone didn’t ring he figured he hadn’t won. Then it rang. “It’s a combination of being thrilled and humbled at the same time, mixed emotions,” he said. “This is a team sport, it gets kind of subjective when you have to pick out individuals.” LIGO, he said, is very deserving. “We happen to be the individuals chosen by whatever mechanism.”
For the National Science Foundation, the Nobel was a welcome victory lap for an investment of 40 years and about $1 billion. In a news release, France Córdova, the foundation’s director, said: “Gravitational waves contain information about their explosive origins and the nature of gravity that cannot be obtained from other astronomical signals. These observations have created the new field of gravitational wave astronomy.”
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