 Gravitational waves were predicted by Einstein almost 100 years ago. A gravitational wave is a ripple in the fabric of space and time. It's produced somewhere in the distant universe and travels across the universe. When any massive object moves, it's changing the nature of space-time. That's what Einstein told us. So you have a motion that stretches space in one direction and compresses space in the other direction. Nobody really believed at the time of the prediction that you could ever detect them because the size of the effect is so small. It was what we call a chirp, and it was strong. Everybody thought it was a fluke, it was too good. And I thought, my God, this looks like it's it. Oh my gosh, this is real. It took us 25 years and two detectors to finally detect a gravitational wave. We have interferometers, one in Hanford, Washington, one in Livingston, Louisiana to detect the stretching and compressing of space. We literally look for changes in the space-time distance in our instruments as the gravitational wave goes by. And the gravitational wave pushes them together in a part by one-one-thousandth the diameter of the nucleus of an atom. No wonder it's taken so long to pull itself. However, what's even more remarkable about this is what we detected. We have observed gravitational waves from two black holes forming a larger black hole. For the first time, two black holes spiraling together, coalescing, merging, creating wild oscillations. A storm in the fabric of space and time. They're moving at the velocity of light damn near that velocity. 30 solar masses moving that fast. I mean, they're putting out incredible amounts of energy. And when they collide with one another, they produce a bigger black hole but they also produce gravitational waves. And in that process, about three solar masses just disappears and goes into gravitational waves. It's going to be amazing. We have always said that this is going to be a field called gravitational wave astronomy. Gravitational waves carry information that you can't get from any other way. A supernova, two neutron stars colliding. Even the big bang itself, the beginning of the universe, all produce gravitational waves. This first detection by LIGO is the very first step. It's just the start of the story nature is about to tell us. I would love to see Einstein's face. I mean, he would have been as dumbfounded as we are because it's a wonderful proof that all of this incredible stuff, the strong field gravity, is in his equations. Just imagine that. To me, that's a miracle. It settles the question for astrophysicists. Do black hole pairs form? Yep, we got one.