A Scots scientist whose 'creative genius' played a key role in the project to detect gravitational waves was unable to celebrate the historic discovery with his colleagues because he is suffering from dementia.
Emeritus professor Ronald Drever, who previously worked at Glasgow University, helped set up the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Ligo) which detected the ripples in space time.
The discovery, which has been called the 'biggest breakthrough of the century', proved Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity.
However, instead of celebrating with his colleagues, Professor Drever, 85, watched yesterday's events from a care home near Edinburgh with his brother Dr Ian Drever.
Kip Thorne, who helped develop Ligo, said Professor Drever's 'creative genius' was vital to the project.
Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, told The Telegraph: "It's very sad. He invented some of the key features, especially the recycling of laser light to effectively increase the path length."
The worldwide hunt for proof of gravitational waves began more than a quarter of a century ago and culminated in the construction of detectors in Louisiana and Washington State.
The project involved 1000 scientists and cost an estimated $620 million dollars (£429m). Following 25 years of work, success came barely a week after the facility underwent the £1 million upgrade to make it more sensitive.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here