Summary: On 11th February, scientists working on the LIGO experiment announced that they had discovered gravitational waves – igniting the scientific world with excitement. The renowned cosmologist Lawrence Krauss, who has been following their work closely, responded with an insightful and beautiful explanation of the discovery in the New York Times. Krauss’s remarkable piece in the New York Times, Finding Beauty in the Darkness, describes the LIGO experiment that enabled the detection of gravitational waves as ‘ testament to the persistent curiosity and ingenuity of humankind — the qualities that we should most celebrate about being human.’ The discovery itself proves that there are ripples in space-time (as predicted by Einstein), ‘which literally cause distances between objects alternately to decrease and increase in an oscillatory manner’. Krauss joined the how to: Academy to explain this extraordinary discovery.
