Plan B Forum

Einstein, A Hunch And Decades Of Work: How Scientists Found Gravitational Waves


On Thursday, researchers announced the discovery of gravitational waves —wrinkles in the very fabric of space-time.

But behind the headlines and news conferences were decades of hard work, hundreds of scientists and more than a billion dollars in taxpayer funds.

"It's profoundly satisfying that it came out the way that we intended, we'd hoped, we'd dreamed," says Kip Thorne, a gravitational theorist at Caltech who co-founded the project.