{"id":12511,"date":"2016-02-18T14:44:24","date_gmt":"2016-02-18T14:44:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/?p=12511"},"modified":"2016-02-23T01:00:43","modified_gmt":"2016-02-23T01:00:43","slug":"a-ripple-effect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/2016\/02\/18\/a-ripple-effect\/","title":{"rendered":"A Ripple Effect"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\u201cI grew up in a family where the stereotypical gender roles were not really observed,\u201d Dr Mavalvala says. \u201cSo I grew up thinking women can, must and should do anything and everything. That is very important for me.\u201d<\/em><\/span><\/h3>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A Pakistani-born scientist has been praised for being part of the team who detected gravitational waves in space.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Dr Nergis Mavalvala is a Pakistani-American astrophysicist, who is also a professor at Massachusets Institute of Technology.<\/p>\n

The Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in a recent statement said \u201cMavalvala is a source of inspiration for Pakistani scientists and students aspiring to become future scientists.\u201d The Prime Minister also added \u201cThe entire nation is proud of her valuable contribution.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mavalvala was among the eagle-eyed team of scientists who , for the first time, observed ripples in the fabric of spacetime called gravitational waves.<\/p>\n

The detection of these waves confirms a significant prediction of Albert Einstein\u2019s 1915 theory of relativity and opens an extraordinary and unprecedented new window onto the cosmos.<\/p>\n

Professor Mavalvala worked alongside other researchers at the US-based underground detectors Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) Lab working on building sophisticated sensors that can detect gravitational ripples created from the collision of two black holes about 1.3 billion years ago and these ripples had been hurtling through space to reach earth on September 14th<\/sup> 2015.<\/p>\n

Dr Mavalvala, 47, born in Karachi to a Parsi family. She spent her primary schooling years in Karachi, moving to the US in her early years and as a teenager she graduated at Wellesley college in 1990 with a BA in physics and astronomy.<\/p>\n

\u201cI started graduate school working in cosmic microwave background, which is another area of astrophysics,\u201d she told the Kavli Foundation in 2010 after receiving the coveted McArthur Fellowship.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cThe group I was working in was moving to another university, and so I was kind of shopping around and bumped into Rai Weiss.\u201d<\/p>\n

Weiss along with Robert Forward had in the early 1970s proposed designs based on which LIGO was formed.<\/p>\n

Dr Mavalvala devoted herself into research on gravitational waves. By the time she received her PhD in 1997, she was already working on building LIGO.<\/p>\n

Dr Mavalvala\u2019s work on gravitational waves has spanned for over 20 years leading up to the discovery.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe big picture mission drives you. When you work in the lab, [it\u2019s like] you bang your head against the wall for weeks at a time, working on a state-of-the-art circuit, for example,\u201d Mavalvala told MIT\u2019s site in 2014. \u201cYet this is what enables scientific discovery, when the smaller to bigger pieces of experiments succeed, when the whole thing does what it is supposed to, and then you hope nature gives you the event you\u2019ve been waiting for.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cI grew up in a family where the stereotypical gender roles were not really observed,\u201d Dr Mavalvala says. \u201cSo I grew up thinking women can, must and should do anything and everything. That is very important for me.\u201d A Pakistani-born scientist has been praised for being part of the team who detected gravitational waves in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":12512,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,3,112],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest","category-news","category-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12511"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12511\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}