Scottish physicist Ronald Drever passed away on March 7. He was 85. He was one of the co-founders of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors that detected the gravitational waves set off by the merger of a binary black hole pair eighteen months ago.
Ronald Drever’s engagement with the detection of gravitational waves goes back into the 1970s, when he was at Glasgow, working on prototype interferometric gravitational wave detectors.
At the invitation of Kip Thorne, who had set up a group to study gravitational waves, Mr. Drever joined Caltech, in the U.S., in the late 1970s. He and Stan Whitcomb led the experimental group at Caltech and were responsible for designing the first 40-metre prototype detector. Rainer Weiss led efforts to build a 1.5 metre prototype at MIT; he was called upon to do a feasibility study by the National Science Foundation in 1980.
In 1984, the National Science Foundation signed an agreement for the construction of LIGO, with Mr. Drever, Mr. Thorne and Mr. Weiss as leaders. In a succinct article titled “A Brief History of LIGO,” posted on the Caltech website, Mr. Thorne and Mr. Weiss outline the progress of the LIGO experiment over the decades until its detection of gravitational waves in 2015.
In 2016, prior to the announcement of the Nobel Prize, the names of this trio was in the news as potential winners. They have also won many other prizes for being the pioneers of the discovery of gravitational waves - the Special Breakthrough Prize for 2016, The Gruber Cosmology Prize, The Kavli prize for astrophysics and so on.
In his later years, Mr. Drever suffered from dementia. Yet, he visited Drever at Edinburgh to convey the news of the discovery of gravitational waves, he was able to reminisce, recall and appreciate the fact, Mr. Thorne has said in an interview to Science .
Apart from having developed the LIGO detectors, Mr. Drever’s life is a lesson in commitment to the idea of LIGO – he had joined the team and started his work in the late 1970s, and the first detection of the gravitational waves took place in 2015.
The years in between signify not merely a long wait but also a period when the baton was passed several times. The experiment itself grew into a project involving a thousand researchers at a time during which firm belief and commitment were demonstrated on the part of the NSF that the LIGO experiment would succeed.
This is what it takes to make an earth-shaking discovery!
