Feb 11, 2016

Dear MIT graduate,

 At about 10:30 this morning in Washington, D.C., MIT, Caltech and the  National Science Foundation (NSF) will make a historic announcement in  physics: the first direct detection of gravitational waves, a disturbance of  space-time that Albert Einstein predicted a century ago.

 You may want to watch the announcement live now. Following the NSF event, you can watch our on-campus announcement event.

 You can read an overview of the discovery here as  well as an interview with  MIT Professor Emeritus Rainer Weiss PhD '62, instigator and a leader of the  Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) effort.

The beauty and power  of basic science
 I do not typically write to you to celebrate individual research  achievements, no matter how impressive; our community produces important work  all the time. But I urge you to reflect on today’s announcement because it  demonstrates, on a grand scale, why and how human beings pursue deep  scientific questions – and why it matters.

 Today's news encompasses at least two compelling stories.

 First is the one the science tells: that with his theory of general  relativity, Einstein correctly predicted the behavior of gravitational waves,  space-time ripples that travel to us from places in the universe where  gravity is immensely strong. Those rippling messages are imperceptibly  faint; until now, they had defied direct observation. Because LIGO  succeeded in detecting these faint messages – from two black holes that  crashed together to form a still larger one – we have remarkable evidence  that the system behaves exactly as Einstein foretold.

 With even the most advanced telescopes that rely on light, we could  not have seen this spectacular collision, because we expect black holes  to emit no light at all. With LIGO's instrumentation, however, we  now have the "ears" to hear it. Equipped with this new sense,  the LIGO team encountered and recorded a fundamental truth about nature  that no one ever has before. And their explorations with this new tool have  only just begun. This is why human beings do science!

 The second story is of human achievement. It begins with Einstein: an  expansive human consciousness that could form a concept so far beyond the  experimental capabilities of his day that inventing the tools to prove its  validity took a hundred years.

 That story extends to the scientific creativity and perseverance of Rai  Weiss and his collaborators. Working for decades at the edge of what was  technologically possible, against the odds Rai led a global  collaboration to turn a brilliant thought experiment into a triumph  of scientific discovery.

 Important characters in that narrative include the dozens of outside  scientists and NSF administrators who, also over decades, systematically  assessed the merits of this ambitious project and determined the grand  investment was worth it. The most recent chapter recounts the scrupulous care  the LIGO team took in presenting these findings to the physics community.  Through the sacred step-by-step process of careful analysis and peer-reviewed  publication, they brought us the confidence to share this news – and they  opened a frontier of exploration.

 At a place like MIT, where so many are engaged in solving real-world  problems, we sometimes justify our nation's investment in basic science by  its practical byproducts. In this case, that appears nearly irrelevant. Yet  immediately useful "results" are here, too: LIGO has been a strenuous  training ground for thousands of undergraduates and hundreds of PhDs – two of  them now members of our faculty.

 What's more, the LIGO team's technological inventiveness and creative  appropriation of tools from other fields produced instrumentation of  unprecedented precision. As we know so well at MIT, human beings cannot  resist the lure of a new tool. LIGO technology will surely be adapted and  developed, "paying off" in ways no one can yet predict. It will be  fun to see where this goes.

*        *        *

The discovery we  celebrate today embodies the paradox of fundamental science: that it is  painstaking, rigorous and slow – and electrifying, revolutionary and  catalytic. Without basic science, our best guess never gets any better, and  "innovation" is tinkering around the edges. With the advance of  basic science, society advances, too.

 I am proud and grateful to belong to a community so well equipped to  appreciate the beauty and meaning of this achievement – and primed to unlock  its opportunities.

 In wonder and admiration,

 L. Rafael Reif

Note added 2/15/2016 I did not realize that there is a group of people  in China that do not believe in Einstein's theory of relativity until  I was informed by my  friends. Now that this GW discovery event is    known and acknowledged worldwide, I see they have chosen to delete  one of their ridiculous comment on this blog article in order to appear  more reasonable.

As the old saying goes:"you are certainly entitled to your opinions and beliefs, but you are not entitled to your own facts". One can always     shout louder and more passionately, but that is religion not science. You should follow the rules of science and present your own theory and evidences to refute the established thoery if you want the rest of the world to believe in yours.