Letter regarding the first direct detection of gravitational waves
The following email was sent today to the MIT community by President L. Rafael Reif. To the members of the MIT community, 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...