t isn’t often that physics produces news that diverts the mainstream media from politics, crime and sports. But, now, in the space of four years’ time, physicists have twice elevated the intellectual content of Google News listings: with the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, and now the detection of the spacetime vibrations known as gravitational waves.
Finding the Higgs shored up the standard model of particle physics, the mathematical framework for understanding the science of the ultrasmall. Gravitational waves cemented the exalted status of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, the math that rules the cosmos at large.
Physicists regard both discoveries as grand accomplishments. Verifying the existence of the Higgs confirmed science’s favored explanation for why nature’s basic particles have mass. Gravitational (or just gravity) waves verified the existence of black holes, in particular confirming that black holes sometimes pair up, twirl around each other and then merge in a cataclysmic explosion. Such a cosmic blast provided the first direct detection of gravity waves, recorded last September by the twin Advanced LIGO observatories in Louisiana and Washington state. Over a brief blip of time, that explosion produced more than 50 times the power of all the stars in the universe put together, as Caltech physicist Kip Thorne explained during the news conference on February 11 announcing the discovery.
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