An award with real gravity: How gravitational waves attracted a Nobel Prize

They were united by their passion to "hear" the universe with gravitational waves

The 2017 Nobel prize for physics, awarded overnight in Sweden by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, began with a discussion 42 years ago between two scientists in a hotel room in Washington DC.

Kip Thorne, a theoretical physicist from Caltech, and Rainer (Rai) Weiss, an experimentalist from MIT, debated what would have seemed to most physicists like a far-fetched, borderline crazy idea: the detection of ripples in the fabric of spacetime called gravitational waves.

But the two young men were serious. Weiss had written a detailed