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Editorial: It turns out Einstein was right

 
Published Feb. 12, 2016

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, a cataclysm happened that proved Albert Einstein right.

Astrophysicists announced last week that they had at long last detected gravitational waves, something predicted by Einstein's Theory of General Relativity a century ago but believed to be nearly impossible to observe.

General Relativity says that we inhabit a universe not of space or of time but of space-time. It's a world in which massive objects warp the very fabric of space in the same way that a heavy bowling ball indents the surface of a foam mattress. The speed of light is constant, but gravity bends it and slows down time. Time passes faster or slower depending on where something or someone is on a space-time continuum.

Einstein's theory predicted that the warping of space-time would create gravitational waves that would pulse through the universe. That's exactly what astrophysicists from the California and Massachusetts institutes of technology have found. They had been searching for years, but only last year did they improve their equipment (called Advanced LIGO) to the incredible tolerances — one ten-thousandth the diameter of a proton — that could be expected to measure a wave passing through the two detectors, one in Louisiana and one in Washington state.

About 1.2 billion years ago in a distant galaxy, two black holes ferociously circled each other, the intense gravity pulling them toward each other with such intensity that they reached half the speed of light. They collapsed into each other, and the massive collision sent shock waves — gravitational waves rippling in space-time itself — that pulsed out across the universe at the speed of light. After traveling for more than a billion years, those gravitational waves hit the detectors on Earth in September.

The scientists checked and double-checked their data to make sure that it was right, which is why they waited until last week to make their peer-reviewed findings public. This is Big Science at its best.

The discovery came at a great cost in time (more than 40 years) and money (more than $1 billion), which will inevitably raise the question of why.

There is a practical reason. To take just one example: Without incorporating Einstein's theory of relativity, GPS satellites wouldn't work.

But there's a more satisfying answer. People are meant to wonder and to dream. That's why we landed on the moon, why we sent Rover to explore Mars and launched the probe Voyager on a grand tour of the planets and out of the solar system into interstellar space. To do these things is to take part in the human adventure.