Mark Hindmarsh
Why I care about gravitational waves. To coincide with Sussex hosting the Institute of Physics' J oint HEPP and APP conference, 21-23 March 2016, Professor Mark Hindmarsh head of the Theoretical Particle Physics group at Sussex,looks ahead to looking back in time. The excitement of the detection of gravitational waves last month by the LIGO team still hasn't worn off for me. It's one thing to be convinced of their existence by a working theory - in this case Einstein's 100-year-old general theory of relativity - it's another to see its predictions borne out with such spectacular clarity. It's the most exciting thing since the Higgs discovery. The real significance is not that Einstein was right (again) but that we now have a completely new way to explore the universe, using radiation which - unlike light - is not obscured by intervening material. Gravitational waves are ripples in space itself, and go right through everything.
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