The New Messengers

Abstract

I present the momentous discovery of gravitational waves, announced in 2016, starting from a confused Einstein who in 1936 tries to convince the scientific community that gravitational waves cannot exist (!), and then illustrating the extraordinary insights and breakthroughs that led 2017 Nobel Prize winners B. Barish, K. Thorne and R. Weiss to open an entirely new window on the Universe. This achievement has marked the beginning of a new era in science, and upcoming experiments have the potential to truly revolutionize our understanding of the Universe. Accounts of the perception of extra-terrestrial reality with senses beyond sight, such as those offered by astronauts who have been on the Moon, are exceedingly rare. That is hardly unsurprising: touch and taste require direct contact, while hearing and smell operate only over short distances, and are in any case confined to the Earth’s thin shell of atmosphere. Sight, on the other hand, allows us to collect the electromagnetic waves emitted by extraordinarily remote celestial objects.