What you see here is a life’s work finally paying off in one of the biggest ways possible. In case you missed it, scientists announced on Monday that they had found gravitational waves and evidence of inflation in the make up of our universe, essentially putting a lot of weight behind the the big bang theory. Jim Parsons is probably ecstatic right now!
The full announcement can be read over here, but the video above shows just how important this discovery is to Stanford professor Andrei Linde, who was surprised at home by Assistant Professor Chao-Lin Kuo. Linde spent his career working on the theory of an inflationary universe and the discoveries at the South Pole are the sweet reward he’s been waiting for. From Discovery:
As announced today, the first observational evidence for the existence of gravitational waves has been acquired by BICEP2. But this isn’t a preliminary finding, this is a bona fide discovery to a probability of 5σ — considered to be the “gold standard” of certainty. The discovery means that BICEP2 has observed gravitational waves that were first created in the first “billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a millionth of a second after the Big Bang,” said Linde. He went on to explain that this is evidence of quantum gravity during the period of rapid inflation after the Big Bang spawned the Universe.
It’s a great look at an important moment, both for science and on a personal level. These are interesting times and it is nice to see that many are able to enjoy the ideas they’ve worked so hard on over time. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some Wings fan fiction to write.
(Via Stanford University / Discovery)