(EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW) The whole world praises VUK MANDIĆ: Confession of a Serb who is behind the biggest discovery in this century! (PHOTO)

News that a man from the town of Priboj was a part of a scientific team which detected gravitational waves and confirmed Einstein's relativity theory and gave us completely new picture of seeing the universe - exploded throughout Serbia.

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His name is Vuk Mandić, an astrophysicist, a member of LIGO corporation (LIGO Scientific Collaboration) – where more than 1000 scientists from more than 14 countries managed to detect the gravitational waves.

Vuk is a professor at physics and astronomy department of the Minnesota University.

He talked for Telegraf news agency for the first time about his scientific work, his relation with the students, his favorite SF movies, but also about the connections with his family in Serbia and Montenegro.

- I tell my students that life in science is full of renouncement and that it takes a lot of  patience and work to come to the results. However, discoveries like this give validity to the choice you made, and they show the value of the renouncement - said professor Mandić.

The scientist who was born in the town of Priboj and grew up in the city of Podgorica where he went to elementary and grammar school, chose to continue his education in America.

Foto: Flickr/Andria

He graduated in 1998 on well-known Technical University in California (CalTech), and he finished his PhD in astrophysics in 2004 on Berkley.

- I wanted to understand better the elementary laws of physics which direct all the processes in the Universe. The earliest stage in University evolution is a unique laboratory, since particles and waves created then have incredibly big energies. We cannot repeat that amount of energy in the labs, that is why we needed to study gravitational waves. They were allegedly emitted in the first seconds after the Big Bang. That is probably the only way to study the laws of physics that are applied for such high amounts of energy and those laws that defined the earliest phase in universe evolution - our scientist explained how he grew to the fundamental physics.

Foto: Flickr/Andria

Professor Mandić said that he was working on Caltech from 2004 to 2007 where he got the Millikan post-doctoral scholarship.

He was there when he started working on LIGO project.

This is the project started in Great Britain during 1970s when the scientists gained the knowledge what kind of technology is necessary to detect gravitational waves and which astrophysical objects can be detected with this kind of technology.

- Albert Einstein foresaw these waves in 1916 but he said they would never be detected due to their intensity. However, technology really advanced in this field in the last decades so we are now able to detect these kind of waves made after the impact of two black holes - explains Mandić and added that these black holes had the mass approximately 30 times larger than the Sun and that at the moment of impact the y moved with the half-speed of the speed of light.

Foto: Flickr/Andria

In a clash like this, a high amount of energy was released - equivalent to the mass of 3 Suns, and it was changed into gravitational waves.

- This event not only confirmed the truth of Einstein's theory, but it also showed that black holes can exist in pairs and that they can move in spiral shape and to attach in the end. Still, the most important consequence of this discovery is that we now have a completely new way of observing the universe.

This scientist thinks that LIGO and many other detectors in the future will expand their sensitivity for gravitational waves, and that we can expect many new discoveries in later years.

By saying that, he probably did not think about SF motifs from one of his favorite movies "Space Odyssey 2001", series "Star Trek", or the movie "The Martian", but of detecting stochastic gravitational waves which are created when the gravitational waves of all the objects in the universe are combined.

- This will probably be the focus of our group in Minnesota for the next couple of years I hope that we will be able to detect the gravitational waves emitted during the Big Bang. That would need new technology and new detectors, and probably decades of work - said this scientist born in the town of Priboj, whose whole family lives in Serbia and Montenegro.

He says this is his strongest connection with both countries.

- Since my parents live in Montenegro, I travel there more often, but I hope to visit Serbia this year. I would like to see Serbian and Montenegrin scientists connected with large world projects, such as LIGO. I am sure that our scientists would be successful in those projects if they got the chance - added Mandić and he stated that the country should invest more in education because this is crucial for society development.

(Telegraf.co.uk)