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Well, let's put it this way: some of my friends (who unlike me didn't drop out of physics) were discussing if LIGO would get the Nobel Prize this morning, and the main point wasn't whether it was deserved (everyone agreed to that), but that the Nobel Prize doesn't get awarded that quickly most of the time.

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I'm just a casual observer so I'm probably way off, so grain of salt but, I believe we'll see more prizes get awarded more quickly as the people who initially lay out the theoretical physics and design the experiments to test their hypothesis are no longer living long enough to see the results of their experiments because the technology to test their ideas lags so far behind what would be needed. Just think of Higgs and the fact that the LHC had to be planned, funded, built, and then used to confirm the Higgs-Boson. Same deal with LIGO.

The big piece of LIGO was the incredible effort that went into data analysis and verification. The second these things were detected a monumental effort went into confirming it meaning when it happened again the methods were already in place. This heavily contributed to how quickly these results were accepted.

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