Ronald Drever

Born on 26 October 1931 in Bishopton, Scotland, Ronald Drever was an experimental physicist who cofounded the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) project. Drever attended Glasgow University, where he earned his BSc in pure science in 1953 and PhD in natural philosophy in 1958. After a postdoc at Harvard University, he returned to Glasgow University, where he attained full professorship in 1979. It was in the early 1970s that Drever first began looking for gravitational waves, ripples in spacetime caused by the collision of dense, massive cosmic objects like black holes. By 1978 Drever had built a gravitational-wave detector. The following year he was recruited by Kip Thorne to head up Caltech’s effort to start a gravitational-wave research program. For the next five years, Drever split his time between Caltech and Glasgow. He became a full-time professor of physics at Caltech in 1984, the same year he, Thorne, and Rainer Weiss, who was at MIT, cofounded the LIGO collaboration. LIGO consists of two 4-km-long L-shaped detectors, one in Hanford, Washington, and the other in Livingston, Louisiana. Construction began in 1994 and continued for the next eight years. Although Drever and Weiss frequently clashed over LIGO’s technical development, Drever proved instrumental in the design of LIGO’s interferometers with his suggestion of using optical cavities. He also implemented power and signal recycling to increase the interferometer’s sensitivity. In 2002 LIGO started collecting data, and in 2015 it achieved the first direct detection of gravitational waves . Drever likely would have shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics with Thorne and Weiss (former LIGO leader Barry Barish also received a share of the prize) had it not been for his death earlier that year , at age 85. (Photo credit: Candid Camera Rinaldi, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives)

Date in History: 26 October 1931