Pas de Deux

Mercury, Sep/Oct 2001 Table of Contents

Adapted from an illustration by Matthew Frey, Wood Ronsaville Harlin, Inc. Courtesy of the National Academy of Sciences

The Nobel-Prize-winning discovery of indirect evidence of gravitational waves came about due to one part ingenuity, one part serendipity, and two parts sheer obstinacy.

by Marcia Bartusiak

Excerpted from Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony: Listening to the Sounds of Space-Time. Published by the Joseph Henry Press. Copyright 2000, Marcia Bartusiak, Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. The full text of this book can be found at the Joseph Henry Press web site at www.jhpress.org.

Marcia Bartusiak’s latest book, Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony, winner of the 2001 American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award (journalist category), describes the exciting 40-year-long quest to capture gravitational waves, the last predicted phenomenon of general relativity yet to be directly detected. New observatories are coming on-line worldwide that may at last discern these vibrations in space-time, providing astronomy with a whole new "sense" with which to explore the cosmos. Success is not guaranteed, but gravitational-wave astronomers are emboldened by the powerful indirect evidence that such space-time ripples are real. In the 1970s, two radio astronomers uncovered one of nature’s most dependable gravitational-wave emitters in the celestial sky: a pair of neutron stars. This is their story.

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