This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three men, but the detection of gravitational waves was the work of a thousand scientists and students — 10 of them from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott.
Read/listen to my full story at KJZZ’s Arizona Science Desk:
Embry-Riddle Scientists, Students Contribute to Nobel-Winning Research
Lasers rank among the most vital and widespread technologies in the industrialized world, but for years they were considered a solution looking for a problem. One possible application lay in communications: Lasers, being of higher frequency and energy than radio, held the potential to communicate more information per second.
Fast-forward to October 2013, when NASA pulled off one of the most impressive proofs-of-concept in history. That month, a spacecraft orbiting the moon sent data 239,000 miles to Earth via a pulsed laser beam at a download rate of 622 megabits per second (by comparison, high-speed consumer data plans are usually measured in the tens of megabits). Everyone from cryptographers to high-speed Wall Street traders sat up and took notice. Sound cool? Read on as I explain…
