Albert Einstein famously said, ‘God does not play dice’ and this is perhaps the reason why he was able to mathematically and theoretically predict the existence of gravitational waves. The theory is complicated and often difficult to understand but the discovery of these waves by a team of astronomers, who claimed to have heard the sound of two black holes colliding a billion light years away, has confirmed what the great scientist had theorised nearly 100 years ago. This discovery is not going to move the ground under your feet, but for astronomers and scientists it is definitely an Eureka moment.
This raises several possibilities including finding ripples of the big bang, the birth of the universe and the exponential expansion of the universe immediately after its birth. The possibilities are immense. This discovery will give astronomers a new tool with which to view the universe and hopefully trace gravitational waves from the past which will help them reconstruct new and more realistic models of the world. That some of the key tasks in tracking these waves were given to Indian astronomers speaks highly of the level of competence and our contribution to understanding the universe. It is nice to know that we were part of this ripple-causing discovery.
