Gravitational Waves Continue to Astound

When Galileo Galilei first pointed a small telescope at the heavens in 1609, he began a revolution in astronomy. Today huge telescopes and radio dishes tell us about the universe. But they cannot directly probe those invisible sharply curved regions of spacetime called black holes or find those so far undiscovered invisible tunnels through spacetime called wormholes, theorized to offer instantaneous cosmic transport and possibly time travel.

Now, though, we have discovered gravitational waves, undulations in spacetime that can directly reveal black holes and wormholes by how they ripple the fabric of the universe. Rainer Weiss of MIT, who with Barry Barish and Kip Thorne of Caltech shared the 2017 Nobel Prize for the discovery, tells Nautilus that astronomical research in the wake of the initial observation “has produced so much science it’s unbelievable.”

Einstein predicted gravitational waves in 1916 after developing general relativity, his theory of gravitation that does not treat gravitation as a force, but as arising from the curvature of spacetime. He showed that an accelerating mass would generate gravitational waves moving at the speed of light, analogous to but different from the electromagnetic waves produced by accelerating electric charges. Einstein himself was unsure if they would ever be discovered, but he fully understood their importance as potentially giving direct experimental evidence of his view of spacetime as the underlying cosmic fabric.