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It's a spectacular signal. It's a signal many of us have wanted to observe since the time LIGO was proposed. It shows the dynamics of objects in the strongest gravitational fields imaginable, a domain where Newton's gravity doesn't work at all, and one needs the fully non-linear Einstein field equations to explain the phenomena.

- Rainer Weiss
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Rainer Weiss
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People say, 'I failed out of college! My life is over!' Well, it's not over. It depends on what you do with it.

The triumph is that the waveform we measure is very well represented by solutions of these equations. Einstein is right in a regime where his theory has never been tested before.

By the time 1967 had rolled around, general relativity had been relegated to mathematics departments... in most people's minds, it bore no relation to physics. And that was mostly because experiments to prove it were so hard to do - all these effects that Einstein's theory had predicted were infinitesimally small.

I said, suppose you take a light - I was thinking of just light bulbs because, in those days, lasers were not yet really there - and sent a light pulse between two masses. Then you do the same when there's a gravitational wave. Lo and behold, you see that the time it takes light to go from one mass to the other changes because of the wave.

By the time we made the discovery in 2015, the National Science Foundation had put close to $1.1 billion into it.

We know about black holes and neutron stars, but we hope there are other phenomena we can see because of the gravitational waves they emit.

You think Earth's gravity is really something when you're climbing the stairs. But, as far as physics goes, it is a pipsqueak, infinitesimal, tiny little effect.

A gravitational wave is a very slight stretching in one dimension. If there's a gravitational wave traveling towards you, you get a stretch in the dimension that's perpendicular to the direction it's moving. And then perpendicular to that first stretch, you have a compression along the other dimension.

Space is much stiffer than you imagine; it's stiffer than a gigantic piece of iron. That's why it's taken so damned long to detect gravitational waves: to deform space takes an enormous amount of energy, and there are only so many things that have enough.

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It's a spectacular signal. It's a signal many of us have wanted to observe since the time LIGO was proposed. It shows the dynamics of objects in the strongest gravitational fields imaginable, a domain where Newton's gravity doesn't work at all, and one needs the fully non-linear Einstein field equations to explain the phenomena.

It's a spectacular signal. It's a signal many of us have wanted to observe since the time LIGO was proposed. It shows the dynamics of objects in the strongest gravitational fields imaginable, a domain where Newton's gravity doesn't work at all, and one needs the fully non-linear Einstein field equations to explain the phenomena.

It's a spectacular signal. It's a signal many of us have wanted to observe since the time LIGO was proposed. It shows the dynamics of objects in the strongest gravitational fields imaginable, a domain where Newton's gravity doesn't work at all, and one needs the fully non-linear Einstein field equations to explain the phenomena.

It's a spectacular signal. It's a signal many of us have wanted to observe since the time LIGO was proposed. It shows the dynamics of objects in the strongest gravitational fields imaginable, a domain where Newton's gravity doesn't work at all, and one needs the fully non-linear Einstein field equations to explain the phenomena.

It's a spectacular signal. It's a signal many of us have wanted to observe since the time LIGO was proposed. It shows the dynamics of objects in the strongest gravitational fields imaginable, a domain where Newton's gravity doesn't work at all, and one needs the fully non-linear Einstein field equations to explain the phenomena.

It's a spectacular signal. It's a signal many of us have wanted to observe since the time LIGO was proposed. It shows the dynamics of objects in the strongest gravitational fields imaginable, a domain where Newton's gravity doesn't work at all, and one needs the fully non-linear Einstein field equations to explain the phenomena.

It's a spectacular signal. It's a signal many of us have wanted to observe since the time LIGO was proposed. It shows the dynamics of objects in the strongest gravitational fields imaginable, a domain where Newton's gravity doesn't work at all, and one needs the fully non-linear Einstein field equations to explain the phenomena.

It's a spectacular signal. It's a signal many of us have wanted to observe since the time LIGO was proposed. It shows the dynamics of objects in the strongest gravitational fields imaginable, a domain where Newton's gravity doesn't work at all, and one needs the fully non-linear Einstein field equations to explain the phenomena.

It's a spectacular signal. It's a signal many of us have wanted to observe since the time LIGO was proposed. It shows the dynamics of objects in the strongest gravitational fields imaginable, a domain where Newton's gravity doesn't work at all, and one needs the fully non-linear Einstein field equations to explain the phenomena.

It's a spectacular signal. It's a signal many of us have wanted to observe since the time LIGO was proposed. It shows the dynamics of objects in the strongest gravitational fields imaginable, a domain where Newton's gravity doesn't work at all, and one needs the fully non-linear Einstein field equations to explain the phenomena.

It's a spectacular signal. It's a signal many of us have wanted to observe since the time LIGO was proposed. It shows the dynamics of objects in the strongest gravitational fields imaginable, a domain where Newton's gravity doesn't work at all, and one needs the fully non-linear Einstein field equations to explain the phenomena.

It's a spectacular signal. It's a signal many of us have wanted to observe since the time LIGO was proposed. It shows the dynamics of objects in the strongest gravitational fields imaginable, a domain where Newton's gravity doesn't work at all, and one needs the fully non-linear Einstein field equations to explain the phenomena.

It's a spectacular signal. It's a signal many of us have wanted to observe since the time LIGO was proposed. It shows the dynamics of objects in the strongest gravitational fields imaginable, a domain where Newton's gravity doesn't work at all, and one needs the fully non-linear Einstein field equations to explain the phenomena.

It's a spectacular signal. It's a signal many of us have wanted to observe since the time LIGO was proposed. It shows the dynamics of objects in the strongest gravitational fields imaginable, a domain where Newton's gravity doesn't work at all, and one needs the fully non-linear Einstein field equations to explain the phenomena.

It's a spectacular signal. It's a signal many of us have wanted to observe since the time LIGO was proposed. It shows the dynamics of objects in the strongest gravitational fields imaginable, a domain where Newton's gravity doesn't work at all, and one needs the fully non-linear Einstein field equations to explain the phenomena.