Einstein Proven Right on His Centennial Anniversary: "Gravitational Waves Exist and They are Going to Blow Your Mind"

News Staff : Feb 11, 2016
West Virginia University - Eberly College of Arts and Sciences

"This is a watershed moment for physics and for science. The direct observation of gravitational waves will fundamentally change our understanding of the universe... This discovery is akin to Galileo first looking through his telescope and seeing the moons of Jupiter. We are "hearing" the Universe now for the first time." –Sean McWilliams

(Morgantown, WV)—Over the past 100 years every prediction that Albert Einstein made in his theory of general relativity has been directly observed, except for one. (Photo/Graphic via Fox News)

Now, on the centennial of the publication of Einstein's magnum opus, a global team of researchers, including an astrophysicist from West Virginia University, has verified that Einstein's final prediction is true.

Gravitational waves exist, and they are going to blow your mind.

Sean McWilliams, assistant professor of physics and astronomy in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, is a member of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, the research team that detected these invisible ripples in space-time.

"This is a watershed moment for physics and for science," said McWilliams. "The direct observation of gravitational waves will fundamentally change our understanding of the universe."

A Beautiful Mind
Einstein's theory of general relativity describes the inner workings of gravity, which is the most important force on the scale of stars, galaxies, and the universe as a whole. Although it is complex and detailed, there is beauty and elegance in the theory's form.

This theory describes space-time as a fabric permeating the universe. Einstein posited that space-time is not a static and rigid stage on which celestial bodies act, but is instead flexible, able to be distorted and warped as large masses move through it. (Photo via Fox News)

Picture a trampoline and a bowling ball. If you place the ball in the center of the trampoline it's mass will cause a dip in the fabric where the ball is placed.

If large, very dense masses move in a particular way, such as pair of black holes or neutron stars spiraling into one another, the disturbances in the gravitational field will travel outward as gravitational waves.

In the analogy, if a pair of bowling balls were set to roll around each other on the trampoline, the fabric of the trampoline would undulate and oscillate, like ripples on a pond, reacting to the movement. The balling balls would lose energy as a result of causing these oscillations, and they would ultimately collide with each other at the center.

The sources of these events occur billions of light years away, so their impact on Earth is infinitesimal. In order to detect gravitational waves, scientists need the most high-tech, sensitive measurement tools in the world...

McWilliams concedes that the detection of gravitational waves won't make your morning commute go faster or get you a bigger tax return, but he says the discovery will open up an entirely new channel of information about the universe, revealing information that was previously unknown. (Graphic: NASA/via Fox News)

He likens the detection of gravitational waves to sound.

"Everything we know about the universe up until now has been visual," says McWilliams. "Now we can not only see what is going on, but we can 'hear' it, too. We'll discover things that we didn't know existed and things that we thought we understood will be revealed in different ways."

Currently, everything we know about the universe is what we have seen through telescopes and particles of light. But unlike light, gravitational waves can pass through the universe unobstructed, so they carry information that we cannot obtain otherwise.

That allows scientists to observe areas of the universe that we have never been able to before, like black holes. Up to this point, scientists had only been able to detect the black holes indirectly...

Beyond the exciting phenomena that scientists expect to observe in the coming years with LIGO and with other gravitational wave detectors, McWilliams emphasized that the possibilities for new and unexpected discoveries is almost without limit.

"This discovery is akin to Galileo first looking through his telescope and seeing the moons of Jupiter. We are "hearing" the Universe now for the first time, and given how much we have learned by seeing the Universe since Galileo's time, it's a genuine thrill to imagine how much we will now be able to learn by listening to gravitational waves."

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