Rainer Weiss, 2017 Princess of Asturias Laureate for Technical and Scientific Research has died

Rainer Weiss, 2017 Princess of Asturias Laureate for Technical and Scientific Research together with Kip S. Thorne, Barry C. Barish and LIGO Scientific Collaboration, has died.

The Jury decided to bestow the Award on Rainer Weiss for “the direct detection of gravitational waves, ripples in space-time anticipated by Albert Einstein in his Theory of General Relativity a century ago now. This achievement provides answers to one of the most important challenges of physics in its entire history. The Award recognizes the individual talent and collective work of more than a thousand researchers belonging to a hundred institutions in eighteen different countries. The LIGO project supposes a technological challenge of prime importance. The extraordinary precision achieved by its instruments has allowed the observation of the merger of very massive black holes that occurred more than a thousand million years ago. The detection of gravitational waves opens up a new window for the study of the Universe that will allow the discovery of new phenomena and the study of regions of space-time that have as yet been non-accessible using current techniques.”

The Jury was chaired by Pedro Miguel Echenique Landiríbar and made up of Juan Luis Arsuaga Ferreras, Juan Ignacio Cirac Sasturáin, Miguel Delibes de Castro, Luis Fernández-Vega Sanz, Cristina Garmendia Mendizábal, Álvaro Giménez Cañete, Bernardo Hernández González, Clara Menéndez Santos, Sir Salvador Moncada, Ginés Morata Pérez, Enrique Moreno González, Teresa Rodrigo Anoro, Inés Rodríguez Hidalgo, Manuel Toharia Cortés and with Santiago García Granda (as acting secretary). 
The Awards Ceremony, which took place on 20th October, was presided over by HM King Felipe VI. Besides the address by His Majesty, the speeches at the ceremony were given by Adam Zagajewski, Marcos Mundstock, a member of Les Luthiers; Philippe de Montebello, then President of the Board of Trustees of the Hispanic Society of America; the then presidents of the European Commission, the European Council, and the European Parliament, respectively, Jean Claude Juncker, Donald Tusk and Antonio Tajani; and Matías Rodríguez Inciarte, then President of the Princess of Asturias Foundation.