Einstein's Theory of Relativity

The New Yorker ~ David Sipress

Excerpted from The New Yorker, by Nicola Twilley:

Gravitational Waves Exist: The Inside Story of how Scientists Finally Found Them

"The waves rippled outward in every direction, weakening as they went. On Earth, dinosaurs rose, evolved, and went extinct. The waves kept going. About fifty thousand years ago, they entered our own Milky Way galaxy, just as Homo Sapiens were beginning to replace our Neanderthal cousins as the planet's dominant species of ape. A hundred years ago, Albert Einstein, one of the more advanced members of the species, predicted the waves' existence, inspiring decades of speculation and fruitless searching. Twenty-two years ago, construction began on an enormous detector, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Laboratory (LIGO). Then, on September 14, 2015, at just before eleven in the morning, Central European Time, the waves reached Earth. Marco Drago, a thirty-two-year-old Italian postdoctoral student and member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, was the first person to notice them. He was sitting in front of his computer at the Albert Einstein Institute, in Hannover, Germany, viewing the LIGO data remotely. The waves appeared on his screen as a compressed squiggle, but the most exquisite ears in the universe, attuned to vibrations of less than a trillionth of an inch, would have heard what astronomers call a chirp - a faint whooping from high to low. This morning, in a press conference in Washington, D.C., the LIGO team announced that the signal constitutes the first direct observation of gravitational waves."