Tucked behind the headlines of this week’s Nobel Prize in physics is a small Gunbarrel company that made a key component in the device that proved Albert Einstein’s gravitational wave theory.
Since 2000, High Precision Devices, or HPD, has been working with the team building the $1 billion Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. LIGO, as it’s known, has been trying to prove these waves exist for decades.
In September 2015, the team observed the phenomenon for the first time.
More than 1,000 researchers, scientists and engineers have been a part of the project, as the Nobel winners Barry Barish and Kip Thorne, of the California Institute of Technology, and Rainer Weiss, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, acknowledged when they learned Tuesday that they had been awarded the Nobel.
Dr. Weiss told the New York Times the award represented some 40 years of work.
Back in Colorado, HPD Director of Business Development Kevin Miller was driving to work when he heard the news that LIGO had finally won the Nobel, and the company has been awash in the glow ever since.
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