Albert Einstein, Gravitational Waves, and Me
Why Astrophysicists Were So Desperate to Catch a 'Whopping Big Signal' from the Universe
Like nearly every other physicist in the world last week, I was glued to my computer screen watching the recent press conference jointly called by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the National Science Foundation. We’d all heard chatter, of course, that a grad student last fall had seen a “whopping big signal” that was nearly too good to be true. But none of that anticipation could compare to the way I felt upon hearing the historic words at the press conference:
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have detected gravitational waves. …
