Polish physicist who disproved Einstein re gravitational waves omitted for 2017 Nobel Prize - expert
Polish 1950s physicist Andrzej Trautman also deserved a Nobel Prize for his work on gravitational waves, Warsaw University physicist Jerzy Lewandowski told PAP commenting this year's Nobel awards in physics.
Earlier on Tuesday the 2017 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne for "decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves".
"We received the news about this year's Nobel winners with mixed feelings, because we strongly counted on recognition for professor Trautman's work. He also deserves the award", Lewandowski said.
Recounting Trautman's work in the 1950s, Lewandowski explained that his studies of gravitational waves appeared at a deciding moment, as in providing the first accurate description of gravitational radiation on the basis of Einstein's relativity theory, he disproved Einstein's doubts about the existence of gravitational waves.
"The question no one could answer then was if gravitational waves existed as a phenomenon involving the movement of energy through time/space as well as its 'leakage' from this time/space. Trautman proved this", Lewandowski said, adding that the Polish scientist "explained how the relativity theory really worked and proved that gravitational waves really existed".
Lewandowski recounted that Trautman's findings were presented at London's King's College, and provided the ground for British and US studies in the field. He added that one of this year's Nobelists, Kip S. Thorne, knew about Trautman's work.
Another Polish contributor to gravitational research known to Thorne and his associates is Krzysztof Belczynski, who, five years prior to the first detection of gravitational waves in September 2015 (announced February 2016), predicted that the first source of the waves would be a collision of black holes and not neutron stars.
Belczynski's Polish-American team, which also included two LIGO staffers, also calculated that the summary mass of the colliding black holes would oscillate between 20 and 80 solar masses.
Belczynski, a former Los Alamos National Laboratory worker, LIGO/VIRGO collaborator and currently at Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences, described his findings as early as 2010 in the collective work, "The effect of metallicity on the detection prospects for gravitational wave", which he wrote with his four associates.
After his April 2014 LIGO Seminar in Pasadena, around 1,5 years before the first gravitational wave detection, LIGO director David Reitze told Belczynski that he was "disappointed" and did not believe in his (Belczynski's - PAP) "black holes".
"Now everybody believes in it", says Belczynski himself, recounting that immediately after the detection, whose nature he had precisely predicted 5 years earlier, the LIGO team was not too enthusiastic to concede that it was the the Polish professor's unlikely theories that had proved right.
Commenting the Nobel Prize for the LIGO team, Belczynski said he was content, and admitted that he was more concerned about not being mentioned when the detection took place.
"But now, my feeling of slight bitterness has been replaced by one of satisfaction", Belczynski said. (PAP)
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