Thursday, October 5, 2017

Physicists Win Nobel Prize for GPU-Powered Gravity Wave Detection

Thanks to an experiment powered in part by GPUs, three American physicists — Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne — have won the 2017 Nobel Prize in physics. The award cites the contributions the three physicists made to Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or “LIGO,” a breakthrough experiment that detected gravitational waves for the first time, a phenomenon Albert Einstein predicted more than a century ago. The waves — ripples in the fabric of space and time — are caused by events such as colliding black holes, making the ability to detect gravity waves key to better understanding our universe.