Waves of Gravity!

In 1916, just one year after Albert Einstein published his already-revolutionary theory of general relativity, Einstein once again revolutionized our understanding of the world by showing that his general theory of relativity implied the existence of wave solutions. In other words , if general relativity implies that space and time can be stretched like the surface of a trampoline, Einstein showed that it was possible for someone to send ripples vet the surface of that trampoline by jumping on the surface! The problem was that these ripples were incredibly weak, so detecting them would necessarily be a very difficult task. Yesterday, almost exactly one century after Einstein made this famous prediction, physicists amounted that they have in fact detected (and therefore confirmed the existence of) gravitational waves.

It's very fortunate that this happened to be announced almost right after my last post about the nature of scientific progress, because it means we can keep talking about it. One important thing that I think everyone should keep in mind is that no scientific theory can ever be proven to be 100% correct. After all, the only thing that can say that a scientific theory has yet to be proven incorrect is experimental confirmation of a scientific prediction. That means there is no way to show that a scoentific theory is absolutely correct, only that it had withstood the trial of experimentation up until the present day.

Nevertheless, is that not how we learn everything, I have no guarantee that the sun will rise tomorrow, but it has risen every day of my life up until today, and that alone is why I'm confident that it will rise again tomorrow. Science is simply a generalization of that line of reasoning.

The nice thing about physics is that it is all formulated mathematically. If I am to accept a theory of physics, I must be prepared to accept everything which is implied by that theory. For example, the notion that we might be able to send waves through a gravitational field. Thus, while I can't say that Einsteins theory of general relativity is definitely correct, what I can say is that, for the last 100 years, it has been able to withstand each an every attempt to disprove it's correctness. That, to me, is as sign that it must at least be a step in the right direction.