Creator of fertilizers and chemical weapons

One of the most controversial Nobel Prize winners was Fritz Haber. The Chemistry Prize was awarded to him in 1918 for his invention of a method for the synthesis of ammonia, a discovery of crucial importance for the production of fertilizers. However, he is also known as the "father of chemical weapons" due to his work on the poisonous gas chlorine used during the First World War.

Deadly discovery

Another German scientist, Otto Han (pictured center), was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1945 for his discovery of the fission of the atomic nucleus. Although he never worked on the military application of this discovery, it led directly to the development of nuclear weapons. Gan received the prize several months after nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

From Friedman to Obama: the most controversial Nobel laureates

A breakthrough that was banned

Swiss chemist Paul Müller won a medical prize in 1948 for his discovery that DDT could effectively kill insects that spread diseases such as malaria. The use of pesticides once saved millions of lives. However, later environmentalists began to argue that DDT poses a threat to human health and harms nature. Today its use is prohibited throughout the world.

From Friedman to Obama: the most controversial Nobel laureates

Inconvenient Reward

Because of its overt and implied political overtones, the Peace Prize is perhaps the most controversial of all the Nobel awards. In 1935, German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky received it for exposing Germany's secret rearmament. Ossietzky himself was in prison on charges of treason, and an outraged Hitler accused the committee of interfering in Germany's internal affairs.

From Friedman to Obama: the most controversial Nobel laureates

(Possible) Peace Prize

The Norwegian committee's decision to award the Peace Prize to US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese leader Le Duc Tho in 1973 faced harsh criticism. The Nobel Prize was supposed to be a symbol of recognition of achievements in achieving a ceasefire during the Vietnam War, but Le Duc Tho refused to receive it. The Vietnam War continued for two more years.

From Friedman to Obama: the most controversial Nobel laureates

Libertarian and dictator

Free market advocate Milton Friedman is one of the most controversial recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize in economics. The committee's decision in 1976 sparked international protests because of Friedman's ties to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Friedman actually visited Chile a year earlier, and critics claim his ideas inspired a regime where thousands were tortured and killed.

From Friedman to Obama: the most controversial Nobel laureates

Vain hopes

The Peace Prize, which was shared in 1994 by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, was supposed to serve as an additional incentive for a peaceful resolution of the conflict in the Middle East. Instead, further negotiations failed, and Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli nationalist a year later.

From Friedman to Obama: the most controversial Nobel laureates

Creepy memoirs

Human rights activist Rigoberta Menchú, who defends the interests of the Mayan people, received the Peace Prize in 1992 “for her struggle for social justice.” Subsequently, this decision caused a lot of controversy, as falsifications were allegedly discovered in her memoirs. Her depictions of the atrocities of the genocide of Guatemala's indigenous people made her famous. However, many are convinced that she deserved the award anyway.

From Friedman to Obama: the most controversial Nobel laureates

Premature reward

When Barack Obama was awarded the Peace Prize in 2009, many were surprised, including himself. Having been president for less than a year at the time, he received the award for his “tremendous efforts to strengthen international diplomacy.” Obama's critics and some supporters felt the award was premature and he received it before he had a chance to make any real moves.

From Friedman to Obama: the most controversial Nobel laureates

Posthumous award

In 2011, the Nobel Committee named Jules Hoffman, Bruce Beutler and Ralph Steinman laureates in medicine for their discoveries in the study of the immune system. The problem was that Steinman had died of cancer a few days earlier. According to the rules, the prize is not awarded posthumously. But the committee still awarded it to Steinman, justifying it by the fact that his death was not yet known at that time.

From Friedman to Obama: the most controversial Nobel laureates

"The Greatest Omission"

The Nobel Prize is controversial not only because of who was awarded it, but also because someone never received it. In 2006, Nobel Committee member Geir Lundestad said that "it is undoubtedly the greatest omission in our 106-year history that Mahatma Gandhi never received the Nobel Peace Prize."

The 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics will be awarded to Americans Barry Barish, Rainer Weiss and Kip Thorne “for their decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and observation gravitational waves", according to the award website.

Space-time disturbances from the merger of a pair of black holes were first reported on September 14, 2015 by the LIGO (Laser Interferometric Gravitational Observatory) collaboration about the discovery.

To date, four signals from black hole mergers have been detected, the latest discovery by LIGO in collaboration with the Virgo Observatory. The existence of gravitational waves is one of the predictions of general relativity. Their discovery not only confirms the latter, but is also considered one of the proofs of the existence of black holes.

In the mid-1970s, Weiss (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) analyzed possible sources of background noise that would distort the measurement results, and also proposed the design of a laser interferometer necessary for this. Weiss and Thorne (Caltech) are the primary architects of LIGO's creation; Barish (Caltech) was LIGO's principal investigator from 1994 to 2005, during the observatory's construction and initial operation.

According to tradition, the official award ceremony will take place in Stockholm (Sweden) on December 10, 2017, the day of death. The award will be presented to the laureates by the King of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf.

The 2017 cash award amounted to SEK 9 million ($1.12 million) for all physics prize winners. Weiss will receive half of the bonus, the other half will be divided equally between Barish and Thorne. The increase in the size of the award, which is usually around one million dollars (for example, 8 million Swedish kronor, or about $953 thousand, in 2016), resulted from the strengthening financial stability fund.

Related materials

The Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded by the Royal Swedish Federation. It also selects laureates from candidates proposed by specialized committees.

The day before, on October 2, the 2017 Nobel Laureates in Medicine or Physiology were Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rozbash and Michael Young “for their discoveries of the molecular mechanisms that control circadian rhythm.”

In 2016, an award in physics, and "for the theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter."

The last Russian scientist to be awarded the Nobel Prize was a theoretical physicist from the Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (FIAN), who was awarded it in 2003 for constructing a phenomenological theory of superconductivity. Together with him, the award was received by the Soviet-American scientist (six months ago) and the British-American physicist Anthony Leggett for the study of superfluid liquids.

In 2010, graduates of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and former employees of the Russian Academy of Sciences won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their research into graphene, a two-dimensional modification of carbon. At the time of receiving the award, they were working at the University of Manchester (UK).

The prize was awarded to American scientists Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish

American scientist Rainer Weiss

Moscow. October 3. website - The Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017 was received by American scientists: Rainer Weiss, professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as Kip Thorne and Barry Barish, professors of physics at the California Institute of Technology, with the wording "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and for the observation of gravitational waves ".

Weiss (85), Thorne (77) and Barish (81) have been considered the top contenders for the Nobel Prize in Physics since the discovery of gravitational waves was announced in 2016 by the LIGO and VIRGO collaborations.

The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 3, 2017

LIGO consists of two gravitational observatories located 3 thousand km from each other - one near Livingston (Louisiana), the other near Hanford (Washington).

Laser interferometers are assembled according to the G-scheme and consist of two perpendicularly located optical arms. Their length is four kilometers. As N+1 explains, the laser beam is split into two components, which pass through the pipes, are reflected from their ends and are combined again. If the length of the arm has changed, the nature of the interference between the beams changes, which is recorded by detectors. The large distance between the observatories allows us to see the difference in the arrival time of gravitational waves - from the assumption that the latter propagate at the speed of light, the difference in arrival time reaches 10 milliseconds.

Physics Prize - 2016

Last year, David Thoules, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz received the Nobel Prize in Physics "for their theoretical discoveries in the topological phases of matter." Topology is a branch of mathematics that studies the properties of geometric objects that are preserved under continuous transformations. Theoretical justification in topological transitions will be able in the future to help create quantum computer and is related to quantum physical phenomena.

Medicine Prize - 2017

Earlier on Monday, October 2, the Nobel Prize winners were announced. The winners were US scientists Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rozbash and Michael Young. They received the award for studying the molecular mechanisms that regulate the body's circadian rhythms. These are daily fluctuations in various parameters of the body, characteristic of almost all living beings.

Researchers independently discovered the period gene and protein in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, the concentration of which fluctuates every 24 hours and determines the functioning of the animal’s “biological clock.”

Nobel Prize winners in 2017 SEK 9 million (about $1.12 million). For the first time since 2001, the Nobel Foundation decided to increase the size of awards to laureates by 12.5%. Previously, the winners received 8 million Swedish kronor (about $931 thousand).

Taking into account inflation, the amount of 9 million crowns is slightly higher than the first bonus paid in 1901 (109%). The total invested capital of the Nobel Foundation at the end of December 2016 was CZK 1.73 billion.

The official presentation of awards and medals will take place in December 2017.

Our entire understanding of the processes occurring in the Universe, ideas about its structure, were formed on the basis of the study of electromagnetic radiation, in other words, photons of all possible energies reaching our devices from the depths of space. But photon observations have their limitations: electromagnetic waves of even the highest energies do not reach us from too distant areas of space.

There are other forms of radiation - neutrino streams and gravitational waves. They can tell you about things that instruments that record electromagnetic waves will never see. In order to “see” neutrinos and gravitational waves, fundamentally new instruments are needed. Three American physicists, Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne and Barry Barrish, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics this year for the creation of a gravitational wave detector and experimental proof of their existence.

From left to right: Rainer Weiss, Barry Barrish and Kip Thorne.

The existence of gravitational waves is provided for by the general theory of relativity and was predicted by Einstein back in 1915. They arise when very massive objects collide with each other and generate disturbances in space-time, diverging at the speed of light in all directions from the point of origin.

Even if the event that generated the wave is huge - for example, two black holes colliding - the effect that the wave has on space-time is extremely small, so it is difficult to register it, which requires very sensitive instruments. Einstein himself believed that a gravitational wave, passing through matter, affects it so little that it cannot be observed. Indeed, the actual effect that a wave has on matter is quite difficult to capture, but indirect effects can be registered. This is exactly what American astrophysicists Joseph Taylor and Russell Hulse did in 1974, measuring the radiation of the double pulsar star PSR 1913+16 and proving that the deviation of its pulsation period from the calculated one is explained by the loss of energy carried away by a gravitational wave. For this they received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1993.

On September 14, 2015, LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, directly detected a gravitational wave for the first time. By the time the wave reached the Earth, it was very weak, but even this weak signal meant a revolution in physics. To make this possible, it took the work of thousands of scientists from twenty countries who built LIGO.

It took several months to verify the results of the fifteenth year, so they were made public only in February 2016. In addition to the main discovery - confirmation of the existence of gravitational waves - there were several more hidden in the results: the first evidence of the existence of black holes of average mass (20−60 solar) and the first evidence that they can merge.

It took the gravitational wave more than a billion years to reach Earth. Far, far away, beyond our galaxy, two black holes crashed into each other, 1.3 billion years passed - and LIGO told us about this event.

The energy of a gravitational wave is enormous, but the amplitude is incredibly small. Feeling it is like measuring the distance to a distant star with an accuracy of tenths of a millimeter. LIGO is capable of this. Weiss developed the concept: back in the 70s, he calculated what terrestrial phenomena could distort the results of observations and how to get rid of them. LIGO consists of two observatories, the distance between which is 3002 kilometers. A gravitational wave travels this distance in 7 milliseconds, so two interferometers refine each other’s readings as the wave passes.

The two LIGO observatories, in Livingston (Louisiana) and Hanford (Washington State), are located 3002 km apart.

Each observatory has two four-kilometer arms emanating from the same point at right angles to each other. Inside they have an almost perfect vacuum. At the beginning and end of each shoulder - complex system mirrors Passing through our planet, a gravitational wave slightly compresses the space where one arm is laid, and stretches the second (without a wave, the length of the arms is strictly the same). A laser beam is fired from the crosshairs of the shoulders, split in two and reflected on the mirrors; Having passed their distance, the rays meet at the crosshairs. If this happens simultaneously, then space-time is calm. And if one of the rays took longer to pass through the shoulder than the other, it means that the gravitational wave lengthened its path and shortened the path of the second ray.

Operation diagram of the LIGO observatory.

LIGO was developed by Weiss (and, of course, his colleagues), Kip Thorne - the world's leading expert in the theory of relativity - performed the theoretical calculations, Barry Barish joined the LIGO team in 1994 and turned a small - just 40 people - group of enthusiasts into a huge international collaboration LIGO/VIRGO, thanks to the well-coordinated work of its participants, a fundamental experiment was made possible, carried out twenty years later.

Work on gravitational wave detectors continues. The first recorded wave was followed by a second, third and fourth; the latter was “caught” not only by LIGO detectors, but also by the recently launched European VIRGO. The fourth gravitational wave, unlike the previous three, was born not in absolute darkness (as a result of the merger of black holes), but with complete illumination - during the explosion of a neutron star; Space and ground-based telescopes also detected an optical source of radiation in the area from which the gravitational wave came.

The Nobel Committee for Physics of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has announced the names of the 2017 winners. Americans Rainer Weiss, Barry Barrish and Kip Thorne became Nobel laureates for the discovery of gravitational waves. Moreover, half of the prize amount ($1 million 120 thousand) will be received by Rainer Weiss, an American physicist of German origin (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). The remaining money will be divided between Barry Barish and Kip Thorne from the California Institute of Technology.

This is the case when a well-deserved award had to look for heroes. The fact is that the discovery of gravitational waves was first announced on February 11, 2016, after the LIGO observatory recorded the passage of a wave born 1.3 billion years ago as a result of the merger of two black holes, the masses of which exceeded the dimensions of the Sun by 36 and 29 times respectively. And the scientific community expected that the Nobel Prize would be awarded to the authors of the discovery last year. However, then the award went to three British scientists for “theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter.”

What is the essence of the discovery?

The existence of gravitational waves was predicted by Albert Einstein back in 1916 as part of his Theory of Relativity. Today, scientists have received proof of the correctness of this fundamental theory, on which we build our ideas about the Universe. What fruits can this knowledge give us? When Heinrich Hertz discovered electromagnetic waves, no one could have imagined that this discovery would form the basis, for example, of mobile communications. Gravitational waves are a discovery of the same order. We are already talking about creating a new branch of space science: gravitational-wave astronomy. With its help, we will learn much more about the structure of the Universe than we can now. With luck, scientists will detect gravitational waves created by the Big Bang - this will provide clues to how our world was created. And hotheads claim that with the help of gravitational waves we will be able to travel to other worlds.

It is believed that Rainer Weiss made a more significant contribution to the creation of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), the instrument with which space-time waves were detected (which is why Weiss will receive a large share of the prize).

LIGO consists of two observatories, which are located at a distance of 3002 kilometers from each other. They were separated in order to determine where the signal came from. The fact is that gravitational waves travel at the speed of light and travel the distance from one observatory to another in 10 milliseconds. Knowing which station recorded the signal first and after what period of time the wave reached the second point, one can quite accurately determine the source of the pulse.

The Russians also took part

Despite the fact that American physicists received the Nobel Prize, the discovery of gravitational waves is largely due to Russian scientists. A team of physicists from Moscow State University joined the LIGO project in 1992, and researchers from the Institute of Applied Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Nizhny Novgorod) began their collaboration in 1997. The Russians made a significant contribution to the creation of a new generation of gravitational wave detectors: they were the ones who were able to catch the faint ripples of space-time.

Interesting facts

The amount of the prize in physics this year is 9 million crowns ($1.12 million). In total, the prize in physics was awarded 110 times to 204 laureates.

The average age of the winners is 55 years. The youngest laureate is the Australian Lawrence Bragg from Australia (25 years old). Together with their father, William Henry Bragg, they received the prize in 1915 for their achievements in the study of crystals using X-rays.

By the way, experimenters receive awards more often than theorists - the discovery must be significant and universally recognized by the world scientific community, as well as supported by real research. The award is given only to authors of scientific articles that have been published in a peer-reviewed press.

What did immigrants from Russia receive in physics?

In 2017, Russian astrophysicist Rashid Sunyaev also appeared on the Nobel list of candidates for the physics prize. He is the co-author of the theory of disk accretion of matter onto black holes - this is the most cited work of Russian scientists abroad (more than 8 thousand references in the scientific literature).

Russian scientists are very successful in the physics category. They have won the prize 10 times, the last one in 2010: Russian natives Andrei Geim and Konstantin Novoselov received the Nobel Prize for creating the world’s thinnest material, graphene. These scientists are now working in the UK.

In 2003, Alexey Abrikosov and Vitaly Ginzburg, together with the Briton Anthony Legette, received the prize “for their innovative contribution to the theory of superconductors.”