physics

Ronald Drever

Ronald Drever is a physics topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Ronald Drever rather than just read about it. In short: Ronald William Prest Drever (26 October 1931 – 7 March 2017) was a Scottish experimental physicist. He was a professor emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, co-founded the LIGO project, and was a co-inventor of the Pound–Drever–Hall technique for laser stabilisation, as well as the Hughes–Drever experiment.

Key takeaways

Ronald Drever belongs to physics; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Ronald Drever to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Ronald Drever from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Ronald William Prest Drever (26 October 1931 – 7 March 2017) was a Scottish experimental physicist. He was a professor emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, co-founded the LIGO project, and was a co-inventor of the Pound–Drever–Hall technique for laser stabilisation, as well as the Hughes–Drever experiment. This work was instrumental in the first detection of gravitational waves in September 2015. Drever died on 7 March 2017, aged 85, seven months before his colleagues Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Barry Barish won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on the observation of gravitational waves. The trio of Drever, Thorne and Weiss shared several major physics prizes in 2016, so it is widely believed that Drever would have won the Nobel Prize in the place of Barry Barish had he not died before the Nobel Committee made their decision.

Education Drever was educated at Glasgow Academy followed by University of Glasgow where he was awarded a bachelor's degree in 1953 followed by a PhD in 1959 for research on orbital electron capture using proportional counters.

Career and research After receiving his PhD from the University of Glasgow in 1959, Drever initiated the Glasgow project to detect gravitational waves in the sixties, after which he established the University’s first dedicated gravitational wave research group in 1970. The same year Drever was recruited to form a gravitational wave program at Caltech. In 1984 Drever left Glasgow to work full-time at Caltech. Drever's contributions to the design and implementation of the LIGO interferometers were critically important to their ability to function in the extreme sensitivity realm required for detection of gravitational waves (10−23 strain). Drever's final work involved the development of magnetically levitated optical tables for seismic isolation of experimental apparatus.

Honors and awards Drever was recognized by numerous awards including:

Fellowship of the American Physical Society (1998) Inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2002) Shared the Einstein Prize (2007) with Rainer Weiss The Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2016) The Gruber Prize in Cosmology (2016) The Shaw Prize (2016) (together with Kip Thorne and Rainer Weiss). The Kavli Prize in Astrophysics (2016). Smithsonian, American Ingenuity Award (2016) The Harvey Prize (2016) Fellowship of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters

Personal life Ronald was a paternal cousin to cartographer and writer, Tim Robinson and paternal uncle of acoustic ecologist, John Levack Drever.

References

Further reading Marcia Bartusiak, Einstein's Unfinished Symphony (Joseph Henry Press, Washington D.C., 2000) – Contains coverage of his work with gravitational wave detectors, including LIGO

External links Media related to Ronald Drever at Wikimedia Commons

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Ronald Drever

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Ronald Drever claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In physics, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Ronald Drever before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Ronald Drever ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Ronald Drever

In research: Ronald Drever appears in physics research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Ronald Drever in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Ronald Drever is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1931 births, 2017 deaths, 20th-century Scottish scientists, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Ronald Drever outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Ronald Drever in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Ronald Drever means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Ronald Drever out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Ronald Drever in simple terms?

Why does Ronald Drever matter?

Because it connects several physics ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Ronald Drever?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Ronald Drever.