Of the three primary sciences, Physics has been recently going through the most upheaval and excitement. The stream of big discoveries started at CERN, where scientist found near-conclusive proof of the existence of the elusive Higgs Boson or God Particle. A little later, while the Large Hadron Collider was given a break, other CERN scientists were working on understanding the nature of antimatter and anti-gravity. Now, it looks like a team at Harvard have made yet another breakthrough discovery that greatly increases our understanding of the universe. Scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics last week made the announcement that they had found the existence of gravitational waves. These waves, predicted to exist in Einstein?s 1916 theory of general relativity, are considered the smoking gun for the dominant theory of how the universe is how it is: the theory of cosmic inflation. The quandary facing most physicists is that the universe as we see it now is too uniform?it?s too evenly spaced and homogenous in every direction. This is not consistent with most theories of how the universe expanded after the Big Bang. The only theory that does explain this is the one on cosmic inflation. This theory says that within one-trillionth of second, the universe went through a short burst of accelerated expansion that smoothened out any irregularities in space-time.
The gravitational waves?ripples in space-time?caused by this burst would be much larger than those created otherwise, and so can be detected by our technology. Once verified, this discovery is very likely to lead to a Nobel prize?it?s that groundbreaking.
