Ronald Drever
Ronald William Perst Drever (born October 26, 1931 in Bishopton , Scotland , † March 7, 2017 in Edinburgh , Scotland) was a British physicist .
Life
Drever was the son of a doctor and grew up in the country under cramped financial circumstances. He received the B.Sc. (Pure Science Honors) from the University of Glasgow in 1953 and the Ph.D. (in Natural Philosophy) 1958 from the same university. He went to Caltech in 1979 and was co-founder of the LIGO project (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory) in 1992 and was involved in the invention of the Pound-Drever-Hall method for frequency stabilization of lasers especially for gravitational wave detectors. Technology played an essential role in the Ligo project. In 1961 he also carried out one of the first Hughes-Drever experiments to measure the anisotropy of mass or space in general relativity. He was a professor at Caltech.
From around 1972 he dealt with gravitational wave detectors of the Weber type, of which he developed those with an unusually high bandwidth, then he turned to laser interferometry for gravitational wave detection in the 1970s. He also dealt with experiments on the gravitational redshift of photons (at Harvard) and atmospheric Cerenkov and fluorescence measurements in connection with supernova observations.
Drever has advised governments on science funding projects, including the National Science Foundation (United States) and the Astronomy Policy and Grants committee (United Kingdom). He was also Vice President of the Royal Astronomical Society .
He was only able to follow the first direct observation of gravitational waves in the Ligo project, which he co-founded, to a limited extent because he was suffering from dementia and lived in a nursing home in Edinburgh. Since 2016 Thomson Reuters has counted him among the favorites for a Nobel Prize ( Thomson Reuters Citation Laureates ) due to the number of his citations . When this was awarded to Barry Barish , Rainer Weiss and Kip Thorne in October 2017 for the LIGO project and the direct detection of gravitational waves, he had already passed away.
Awards
- Fellow of the American Physical Society
- Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh
- 2002 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- 2007 Einstein Prize
- 2016 Gruber Prize for Cosmology
- 2016 Special Fundamental Physics Prize
- 2016 Shaw Prize
- 2016 Kavli Prize
- 2016 Harvey Prize
Fonts
- RWP Drever, GM Ford, J. Hough, IM Kerr, AJ Munley, JR Pugh, NA Robertson, H. Ward: A gravity wave detector using optical cavity sensing, in: Schmutzer (Ed.), Proc. 9th Int. Conf. Gen.Rel. Grav., Jena 1980, pp. 265-267
- RWP Drever, JL Hall, FV Kowalsky, J. Hough, GM Ford, AJ Munley, H. Ward: Laser phase and frequency stabilization using an optical resonator, Appl. Phys. B, Vol. 31, 1983, pp. 97-105
literature
- Rainer Weiss : Ronald Drever (1931-2017). In: Nature . Volume 544, No. 7650, 2017, p. 298, doi: 10.1038 / 544298a
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Janna Levin, Black hole blues and other songs from outer space, The Bodley Head, London 2016
- ^ Autobiography of Ronald WP Drever. September 26, 2016, accessed November 19, 2017 .
- ↑ Jonathan Amos: Gravitational waves pioneer Ronald Drever dies. In: British Broadcasting Corporation . March 8, 2017, accessed March 8, 2017 .
- ↑ British scientist who played key role in gravitational waves research is suffering from dementia, The Telegraph 2016
- ↑ Web of Science Predicts 2016 Nobel Prize Winners. (No longer available online.) In: ipscience.thomsonreuters.com. September 21, 2016, archived from the original on September 21, 2016 ; accessed on September 21, 2016 (English). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ Five Caltech Faculty Members Elected to Membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on June 1, 2010 ; accessed on October 21, 2011 (English). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ Prize Recipient. Retrieved October 21, 2011 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Drever, Ronald |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Drever, Ronald WP; Drever, Ronald William Perst (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British physicist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 26, 1931 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | at Paisley , Scotland , United Kingdom |
| DATE OF DEATH | March 7, 2017 |
| Place of death | Edinburgh , Scotland , United Kingdom |