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When a young David Blair arrived in the United States in the 1970s to help build a gravitational wave detector, he thought it would be a short-term project.
“I thought I’d go there, spend a year or two, detect these waves and then go ahead and do something else,” says the physicist at the University of Western Australia wryly.
“I never imagined that I would be involved in this for the next four decades and we would struggle and struggle and struggle until we finally managed to detect these waves.”
That breakthrough finally came on September 14, 2015, a date etched in Prof Blair’s memory and one that came nearly 100 years after Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves in his general theory of relativity.
Professor Emeritus Blair and his colleagues, Peter Veitch of Adelaide University and David McClelland and Susan Scott of Australian National University, have all contributed significantly to the groundbreaking global discovery.
The quartet was jointly awarded the nation’s best science gong, the 2020 Prime Minister’s Science Award.
Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of time and space produced by the merger of black holes and exploding stars.
They pour into the earth all the time, but our instruments haven’t been sensitive enough to detect them until recent years.
Building equipment that could sharpen the waves and block everything else meant developing what Prof Blair describes as the quietest place in the universe.
The process included hanging mirrors with devices called vibration isolators – “kind of like a car suspension but billions of times better.”
“People thought that space was just empty and silent and that space was also something a little stiff: matter didn’t affect space and when you walk around the room, you’re not changing the room,” says Prof Blair.
“But the reality is that you are … all matter is intertwined with space and time.
“It’s completely different from all the things we learn in school.”
It is for this reason that Prof Blair is leading an international program to change the way physics is taught.
And it’s not just about proving a theory.
Prof Blair’s invention of the first ultra-precise sapphire watch was used to advance GPS navigation and radar, and vibration suppression technology was used to help planes search for minerals underground.
Meanwhile, work on two key environmental issues, recycling processes for mixed plastics and low-cost battery technology for renewable energy storage, has seen Professor Thomas Maschmeyer of the University of Sydney award the First Prize. $ 250,000 Minister of Innovation.
The awards come during a difficult year for universities.
A slump in revenue due to the COVID-19 pandemic has led to massive job cuts and prompted calls for more federal government support.
“The fact that they are giving an award for something that might seem a little esoteric shows that on some level, the government really recognizes the importance of science,” says Prof. Blair.
“But that recognition … it has to go much further. And if the government doesn’t increase its investment in universities, I think we’re just cutting our throats.”
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