物理学的集体大项目越来越多，而诺奖获胜者只限3人，早在2013年的希格斯玻色子获物理学诺奖就引起争议。The 2013, Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three physicists for the discovery of the Higgs boson particle, a breakthrough that involved the work of multiple international teams and thousands of scientists and engineers. The 2013 award in particular sparked debate in the science community as to whether the prize process overlooks the collaborative nature of scientific innovation
2017年又是一个集体合作大项目获奖，也是3个人得奖。但颁给谁却也不是没有可议之处的。早在一年前，英国《卫报》就有文章（https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/feb/12/gravitational-waves-who-should-win-the-nobel-prize）猜测引力波获诺奖的话，那些个人会得。
These are Rainer Weiss of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Kip Thorne and Ronald Drever of the California Institute of Technology, the three founders of Ligo, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory in the US.
这三个人中：
Utah-born Kip Thorne is named in Hawking’s book A Brief History of Time as the other gambler in a famous bet with Hawking about whether black holes would ever be observed. He is a theorist who explored the notional structure and topography of black holes, and worked out the mechanisms for wormholes in space that might permit time travel.
The Berlin-born Rainer Weiss was one of the intellects behind Nasa’s cosmic microwave background experiment that detected the tiny fluctuations in the temperature of intergalactic space in the 1990s, and an experimenter who introduced laser interferometry to gravitational wave observation. Ronald Drever, for many years at Caltech, co-invented the mechanism for stabilising the Ligo laser and then returned to his native Scotland: sadly, he was too ill to attend the press event that celebrated the announcement on Thursday.
尤其是Rainer Weiss 和Ronald Drever贡献最大，“the key players were Rainer Weiss at MIT and Ron Drever at Caltech: they were the experimentalists who invented a number of ingenious tricks to reduce the noise and increase the sensitivity of the instrument to these astonishing levels”（ Neil Turok, of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada）
但是Ronald Drever走了，只好再胡乱选一个人。
最终下面三个人拿了今年物理学诺奖：
Kip Thorne, Rainer Weiss and Barry Barish have won the 2017 Nobel prize in physics for the Ligo instrument and its detection of gravitational waves, the ripples in spacetime first predicted by Einstein 100 years ago.
这三个人分别起什么作用呢？根据下面的描述，我看有些牵强。
Weiss would be acknowledged as crucial to devising (along with the late Ron Drever) the amazingly precise laser techniques, and seeing them through to successful implementation. Thorne, an outstanding theorist, mentor, and intellectual leader, has been an inspiring cheerleader of Ligo for three decades, and Barish, with prior experience of managing large projects in particle physics, was brought in co-coordinate the development and construction of the facilities. （Sir Martin Rees, emeritus professor of physics at the University of Cambridge, and the Astronomer Royal. ）
见：
相关专题：2017年诺贝尔奖
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