At BYU, Nobel Prize-winning modern Galileo talks about his work that helped prove Einstein right about gravitational waves

Two black holes spiraled into each other in a spectacular collision 1.3 billion years ago.

The black holes in a galaxy far, far away then merged, vibrated and produced gravitational waves, a type of space wave that humans could not detect for a century after Albert Einstein first predicted them in 1916.

For 1.3 billion years, the waves shuddered across intergalactic space until they reached our Milky Way galaxy 50,000 years ago, when human ancestors shared Earth with Neanderthals.

For the past four decades, a global collaboration raced to create a gravitational-wave detector envisioned by a theoretical physicist who grew up in Logan, Utah.

Kip Thorne and a few colleagues at MIT and CalTech began in 1972 to conceive a way to prove Einstein’s theory of gravitational waves.

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