A long line of students stood outside a Beijing Normal University building on a recent winter's night. The young people braved the chill while waiting patiently to enter the venue for the start of a highly anticipated lecture. Outside of the campus, hundreds of thousands of viewers waited for the live broadcast of the lecture online.

The lecture, titled LIGO and Gravitational Waves: A New Way to Explore the Universe, was delivered on Dec 19 by two of this year's Nobel laureates from the United States: Rainer Weiss, a professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Kip Stephen Thorne, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology.

In September 2015, Thorne, Weiss and Barry Barish, a professor at the California Institute of Technology, discovered the first gravitational wave created by the collision of two black holes. The waves were predicted by Albert Einstein about 100 years ago.

In October, the three scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves", said the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

On Dec 17, they were invited to Shanghai to receive the 2017 Fudan-Zhongzhi Science Award. The laureates shared the 3 million yuan ($455,000) prize for their contributions to the research on gravitational waves.

The award, jointly founded by Fudan University and Zhongzhi Enterprise Group in 2015, recognizes scientists who have made achievements in the fields of physics, biomedicine and mathematics.

According to the executive council that decides the winners, Weiss was given the prize for inventing the laser interferometer gravitational-wave detector that became the foundation for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO, which detected gravitational waves for the first time in human history.

Thorne was honored for creating research programs that modeled gravitational waves emitted by astrophysical processes and developed data-analysis methods. He also contributed to the formulation of fundamental concepts in the theory of quantum metrology.

Barish was awarded for leadership in the construction and initial operations of LIGO and the creation of the international LIGO Scientific Collaboration.

The scientists' findings and their research launched a new era of science, says Samuel Chao Chung Ting, a Chinese-American Nobel laureate and chairman of the award committee.

Their research also lays a solid foundation for black hole research, and has propelled the development of different science fields, including nuclear physics and astrophysics, says Ting.

The lecture in Beijing was hosted by the Future Forum, a nonprofit platform devoted to promoting science and scientists in China. It covered an array of physics topics, ranging from the introduction of the Nobel laureates' cutting-edge research to future LIGO improvements.

Weiss and Thorne also answered questions from the audience during the panel discussion moderated by Zhang Fan, an associate professor at Beijing Normal University.

Q&A

Rainer Weiss, US physicist and Nobel laureate

What would happen to the gravitational wave if it's fast enough to reach the edge of the expanding universe?

That depends a lot on what the real model of the universe is.

We have different models of the universe.

The one we now believe in the most is the one which is very depressing, the one which expands faster with time. What happens is the gravitational wave just gets weaker and weaker and weaker ... going out to infinity and there is no edge.

As a scientist, what do you want to say to the media and science communicators?

I like to communicate with people about science, especially young people because they get so excited if you explain it right to them.

If you don't use big words or a lot of mathematics, they grab it, and they really love it. When you explain to somebody how a rainbow works, with little reflections inside the drops, kids get intensely excited about that.

What I like is ... kids get enamored by what they have. Adults shouldn't lose that.

One of the reasons why it's fun to talk to kids and explain science to them is because you really open their eyes to something.

You experience so much more if you understand something. It's like somebody reads you a poem, and the words are there. If somebody explains to you what the poem really says, that makes the poem even more interesting.

I go to talk to high schools, grades schools and even talk to kindergartens. The more you can do that, the more likely they will go home and explain to their parents what they saw. Parents will get drawn in a little themselves. That's the way we are saving the world.

Kip Stephen Thorne, US theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate

Do you believe time travel is possible?

We have an educated guess based on a lot of calculations on the laws of nature that the probability to time travel is very small, but we are not sure.

The issue is there is a physical process, by which no matter how you make the time machine, the moment that it is activated, it will destroy itself.

The first thing that can travel through the time machine, go backward in time and return to where it started is light or vacuum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field or other fields in nature.

When we did the analysis, it looked to us that the explosion becomes sufficiently intense－you work on such a small time scale that the laws of physics that are used to do the calculation break down. You have to switch to use the quantum gravity that we don't understand.

Stephen Hawking and I agree that we're not likely to get an answer until we have the laws of quantum gravity, which also controls the growth of the universe and controls what happens inside the black holes.

How important is science communication?

Our world has major problems and opportunities that are technological and scientific. Global warming is perhaps one of the most important issues. If we're going to solve these problems, it is necessary that we get an understanding of them and enthusiasm about solving them from a large fraction of the world population.

That means people need to understand science－at least at the level of understanding that certain predictions are reliable and others are not, and knowing whom you can trust about scientific predictions and having some sense of how science is done.

We don't do well in educating the general population in America. I hope you do better in China.

Related

Go to Forum >>0 Comment(s)