http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/10/us/gravitational-waves-announcement-feat/index.html

On Thursday, scientists are expected to declare they have detected gravitational waves. Not only will such a discovery support a prediction that’s essential to Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, but it will also add to our understanding of the universe, said Szabolcs Marka, a physics professor at Columbia University.

“The discovery of gravitational waves is, I think, the most important breakthrough in modern science,” said Marka, leader of the Columbia Experimental Gravity Group, a member of LIGO, the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.

LIGO is the organization that is expected to announce the discovery Thursday.

“Gravitational waves, when we discover them, will open a new window on the universe,” Marka told CNN’s Rachel Crane. “We will be able to study not just Einstein’s general relativity — we’ll be able to find objects we only imagined would exist. We should see a universe that has never been observed before.”

100 years ago Einstein used math, logic, and his intuition about the inherent beauty of the laws that govern the cosmos to derive the General theory of relativity. The theory was so solid, so consistent, so beautiful that when British astronomer Arthur Eddington confirmed its prediction that the sun’s gravity would bend starlight Einstein was asked how he would have felt if Eddington had disproved his prediction… his response was “I would have felt sorry for the Lord. The theory is correct.”

In the century since there has been a steady stream of other confirmations of Einstein’s theory… but one of his weirder predictions has eluded experimental confirmation. Gravity waves- gravity waves washing over us, distorting the fabric of space as they pass by. Countless experiments were conducted searching for them. All failed.

Finally LIGO was built, it uses lasers to measure slight differences in the kilometers long separation between two mirrors- it is able to detect changes in this distance equivalent to 1/1000 the diameter of a proton.

(Lasers by the way were first proposed by Einstein, one year after the theory of general relativity… )

It seems likely that after a century of searching LIGO has finally found them… and so, 60 years after his death, Einstein has opened our eyes to a whole new universe once again…

We will find out tomorrow…possibly it will be another day in which the universe as humanity knows it…changed.

Fingers crossed!