On this day of 3 October 2017 Kip Thorne (Caltech) has been awarded the prestigious Nobel Prize in Physics 2017 jointly with his close collaborators Rainer Weiss (MIT) and Barry C. Barish (Caltech) for “decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves".
Kip Thorne, the Feynman professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology, is a renowned theorist, a world expert in General Relativity and black hole physics, who made crucial predictions of what the detection of a gravitational wave would actually look like and how to identify that signal within the data.
Kip Thorne is associated to our Catholic University of Louvain by having been awarded in October 2016 the prestigious Georges Lemaître International Prize precisely for his scientific career's many seminal contributions and the discovery of gravitational waves in particular.
On the occasion of his visit with us last October, Kip Thorne agreed to actively contribute to a series of events. He is pictured here (center) together with Profs. Jan Govaerts (left) and Prof. Jean-Marc Gérard (right), on the very day of his award of the Georges Lemaître Prize at the University.