Caltech, MIT scientists share Nobel Prize in physics for gravitational wave discoveries

In 1975, physicists Kip Thorne and Rainer Weiss visited Washington, D.C., for a NASA meeting and wound up sharing a hotel room. One was a theorist from Caltech; the other an experimentalist from MIT. They hardly knew each other. But that night, they ended up talking until around 4 a.m. about building a machine that could detect tiny ripples in the fabric of space-time.

Four decades later, the pair, along with colleague Barry Barish of Caltech, won the Nobel Prize in physics for their discovery of gravitational waves. The feat offered experimental proof of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity and ushered in a new field of astronomy