Newswise — FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Three American scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics Oct. 2 for their work detecting gravitational waves, first predicted by Albert Einstein in 1915. The scientists ­– Kip Thorne and Barry C. Barish of the California Institute of Technology, and Rainer Weiss of Massachusetts Institute of Technology – were part of the LIGO-Virgo detector collaboration that discovered how gravity ripples through space like a shock wave.

University of Arkansas associate professor Daniel Kennefick, an astrophysicist and science historian, studied with Thorne as a graduate student at Caltech and wrote his physics thesis on gravitational waves and general relativity. He has since written or contributed to seven books on Einstein and numerous articles on relativity, gravitational waves, black holes, dark matter and other topics in astrophysics.

Kennefick can be reached for comment via email at [email protected].