Kip Thorne, Ron Drever and Robbie Vogt, the first director of LIGO, in a photo taken in 1990. The 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded on October 3, 2017, to three of the founders of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO): Caltech's Kip S. Thorne and Barry C. Barish, and MIT's Rainer Weiss. On September 14, 2015, LIGO made the first-ever direct detection of gravitational waves, or ripples in the fabric of space and time, which had been predicted by Albert Einstein 100 years earlier. Photo by Caltech/UPI