The quest for gravitational waves began with Einsteins prediction exactly 100 years ago. The first experimental search began in 1960. From 1970 onwards the gravitational wave spectrum was mapped out theoretically. Misunderstandings and false claims of detection have created scepticism and hampered the field from the beginning. A growing band of optimistic experimentalists persisted decade after decade. Finally, after having achieved 14 orders of magnitude improvement in 40 years, two detectors 3000 kilometres apart, detected a powerful gravitational wave event. The event matched our wildest dreams. In one tenth of a second 200 bytes of data changed our way of thinking, opening new questions and motivating exciting new possibilities for observing the entire universe in gravitational waves, including the big bang itself. Exciting opportunities of great significance to UWA will also be reported.
↧