Scottish-born scientists, David Thouless and Michael Kosterlitz, along with Duncan Haldane from London, have been awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in physics for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter. David, a Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington, originates from Bearsden. Michael Kosterlitz, a physics professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island comes from Aberdeen. SUPA has extended congratulations to both.
https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2016/
Ronald Drever, who initiated the gravitational waves group at the University of Glasgow in 1970, has with Kip Thorne and Rainer Weiss and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, been awarded the Yuri Milner Foundation’s Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2016) and the Gruber Prize in Cosmology (2016), together with the Shaw Prize in Astronomy (2016) and the Kavli Prize in Astrophysics (2016). Ron, a pioneer of gravitational wave detector experiments and laser stabilisation, co-founded ‘LIGO’, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory in the US, which after an upgrade involving major input from the UK/German GEO 600 project led to the discovery of gravitational waves in September 2015. Ron is Professor of Physics Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology.