Here's How It Felt to Discover Gravitational Waves (Kavli Hangout)

When Rainer "Rai" Weiss and colleagues first proposed an audacious experiment to detect ripples in space-time, called gravitational waves, in the late 1970s, they knew the whole endeavor was a long shot. Now, four decades later, millions of people worldwide have read about the historic detection of gravitational waves as the result of Weiss and his fellow scientists' efforts: the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). At the U.S. National Science Foundation's LIGO announcement in Washington, D.C. last week, Weiss called it "a miracle" that the equations first predicting gravitational waves — which Albert Einstein wrote a century ago — work so well in describing the black hole system LIGO found.

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