[ti:Scientists Win Nobel Prize in Physics for Measuring Gravitational Waves] [by:www.51voa.com] [00:00.00]更多听力请访问51VOA.COM [00:01.20]Three scientists have won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics [00:07.04]for their work in measuring gravitational waves. [00:12.00]The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the prize winners on Tuesday. [00:18.72]The scientists are Rainer Weiss of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, [00:24.60]and Barry Barish and Kip Thorne, both of whom work at the California Institute of Technology. [00:33.44]The three men were involved in the first actual observation of gravitational waves in September 2015. [00:41.83]They are being recognized for a combination of highly developed scientific theory and equipment design. [00:51.32]The German-born Weiss was awarded half of the $1.1 million in prize money. [00:59.40]Thorne and Barish will split the other half. [01:03.28]The physics prize has been split among two or more winners for the past 25 years. [01:10.88]About a hundred years ago, Albert Einstein proposed his General Theory of Relativity. [01:18.60]It predicted the existence of gravitational waves anytime an object accelerates, or speeds up. [01:27.24]His theory changed the way scientists understand the universe. [01:32.40]But only recently were the waves seen, proving Einstein was correct. [01:39.68]Barish told the Associated Press that the Nobel prize is "a win for Einstein, and a very big one." [01:49.32]Weiss, Barish and Thorne were leaders in the experiments performed [01:54.68]at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO. [02:00.80]They measured very small disturbances the waves make to space and time as they pass through the Earth. [02:10.48]LIGO measured gravitational waves for the first time about two years ago. [02:16.88]Those waves were produced when two "black holes" came together [02:21.76]and formed a single, huge black hole. [02:26.04]The two black holes were about 1.3 billion light-years from Earth. [02:32.56]A light-year is the distance that light travels in one year: about 9.46 trillion kilometers. [02:42.88]When the discovery of gravitational waves was announced several months later, [02:49.40]scientists and other people were astonished. [02:54.40]Weiss said of the physics prize: "I view this more as a thing [02:59.76]that recognizes the work of a thousand people." [03:04.20]Weiss has been attempting to detect gravitational waves for many years. [03:09.84]He designed a laser-based device in the 1970s to do so. [03:15.96]The Nobel announcement said that Weiss, Thorne and Barish [03:21.44]"ensured that four decades of effort led to gravitational waves finally being observed." [03:28.88]It noted that Einstein believed gravitational waves could never be measured. [03:35.48]Thorne told the Associated Press from California shortly after the announcement [03:40.96]that "it's a win for the human race as a whole. [03:45.68]These gravitational waves will be powerful ways for the human race to explore the universe." [03:53.68]Ariel Goobar is with the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. [03:59.12]He said the winners' work meant "we can study processes which were completely impossible, [04:06.00]out of reach to us in the past. The best comparison is when Galileo discovered the telescope, [04:14.28]which allowed us to see that Jupiter had moons and all of a sudden [04:19.36]we discovered that the universe was much vaster than we used to think about," he added. [04:25.12]Patrick Sutton is an astronomer at Cardiff University in Wales. [04:31.20]He told the AP that with the technology the scientists developed [04:36.44]"we may even see entirely new objects that we haven't even imagined yet." [04:43.28]I'm Phil Dierking. 更多听力请访问51VOA.COM