When words, particularly superlative adjectives, are adopted for popular colloquial use, they often lose their original utility. Overuse renders them boring, pedestrian, stale. Perhaps no other word in recent memory has suffered this diminishment more than ‘awesome’.
This is a word that literally means to inspire wonder or excitement, so to hear it used in its current context for describing McDonalds French fries, the current episode of Honey Boo Boo or someone’s latest bowel movement simply doesn’t do it justice.
It’s unfortunate, too, because just last week there was news from the world of science that truly was awesome when researchers announced they had direct evidence for the existence of gravitational waves.
In November 1915, Albert Einstein presented his field equations, the crown on his Theory of General Relativity (GR), to the Prussian Academy of Sciences. The true genius of relativity is evidenced by the fact that even 100 years later, it still feels like modern science and that one of its key predictions remained unproven.
Another astounding aspect of Einsteinian insight is the fact that for the vast majority of humanity, we would still be getting along just fine with Newtonian physics. After all, at the local level, the bending of space-time (or even the existence of space-time) has little to do with liberating apples from trees, plotting the trajectory of a cannonball or developing a better curling broom.
Nevertheless, over the past century, the predictions of relativity have been proven time and again, from the perihelion precession of Mercury to the existence of black holes to the equivalence principle.
The most elusive of GR predictions, however, was gravitational waves. There is a scientific stereotype, best exploited by the popular sitcom Big Bang Theory that a certain amount of animosity exists between theoretical and experimental physicists.
There is no question that visionaries such as Einstein and Newton are just about the only guys in the room who, at the time of their ground-breaking discoveries, can do the math required to establish a new scientific theory. Designing an experiment to prove it, however, can be just as impressive, particularly in the case of something like gravitational waves.
In the first place, only the most violent and massive cosmic events can produce the phenomenon, say, a collision between two black holes a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Secondly, to detect the gravitational waves from said event, you would need an instrument so ridiculously sensitive it could record the pull/stretch of a gravitational wave to one-one thousandths the diameter of a proton, for example, a Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) consisting of two L-shaped antennae with four-kilometre arms separated by a continent.
The two black holes that created the waves felt around the scientific world last week, were relatively small by cosmic standards, just 29 and 36 times more massive than our sun respectively. Their merger created a 62-sun black hole, releasing three suns worth of energy into the wilds of space.
That was 1.3 billion years ago. At that space-time, the most complex life on Earth was red algae called Bangiomorpha pubescens, Albert Einstein’s great-great-great-great to the power of infinity ancestors. The waves entered our galaxy, the Milky Way, around the same time homo sapiens was entering central Asia, 50,000 years ago.
As incomprehensible as the colossal distance, vast time interval and massive power involved in the initial event are on the macro scale so are the infinitesimal distances, inconsequential time interval and imperceptible delicacy of recording it on the micro scale.
When the waves reached Earth on September 14, 2015 they made the tiniest of chirps stretching the 4-kilometre antennae just four-one-thousandths of a proton’s diameter.
All of it, the collision of two black holes, the development of General Relativity and prediction of gravitational waves, the design of the experiment to prove the prediction and the ultimate result of that experiment is what adjectives such as awesome were meant for.
