Ronald W. P. Drever
British physicist
Who was Ronald W. P. Drever?
Ronald William Prest Drever (26 October 1931 – 7 March 2017) was a Scottish experimental physicist. He was a professor emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, co-founded the LIGO project, and was a co-inventor of the Pound–Drever–Hall technique for laser stabilisation, as well as the Hughes–Drever experiment.
Historical significance
This work was instrumental in the first detection of gravitational waves in September 2015. Drever died, aged 85, seven months before his colleagues Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Barry Barish won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on the observation of gravitational waves. The trio of Drever, Thorne and Weiss shared several major physics prizes in 2016, so it is widely believed that Drever would have won the Nobel Prize in the place of Barry Barish had he not died before the Nobel Committee made their decision.
