Yesterday's announcement by the international LIGO collaboration of the direct detection of gravitational radiation on September 14, 2015, initiates a new phase in the exploration of the universe and our search for the physical laws that govern it. Of course the details of the measurement must and will get the critical scrutiny they deserve—this is the way of science—but the data shown seem very convincing.
This report represents a triumph on many fronts. It is a reward for a long line of theorists. starting with Albert Einstein a century ago this year, who gradually figured out how to represent, calculate and seek the observable properties of these waves of gravitation. It is a tribute to the battalion of experimental and computational physicists and engineers, experts on optics, lasers, signal processing and much more, who worked on this quest for more than three decades, gradually honing their techniques to be able to measure distances smaller than a thousandth of a proton diameter and detect true signals in an unforgiving background of seismic, thermal and laser noise. It is a vindication of government agencies around the world, notably the financially strapped US National Science Foundation, who kept faith with an unproven technique, in the face of skepticism and intense competition from safer science.
To read more, click here.