One billion light years ago two black holes collided. One hundred years ago, Albert Einstein predicted that this impact would send gravitational ripples through the universe. Six months ago, using giant ultrasenstive hi-tech L-shaped antennae, scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory in Louisiana found evidence of one of Einstein’s gravitational waves. They even reformatted their graph of it into a sound wave, a satisfying little chirp, so that earthlings could ‘listen’ to this echo of the original explosion.
In an election season in which Asian stockmarkets are tumbling and the Middle East remains mired in sanguinary conflicts, this little triumph will receive much less attention than it deserves. That is a pity, for like the ingenious bubble chamber which Donald Glaser invented in 1952 — a device which used special low-pressure superheated liquids to track charged particles using the microscopic bubbles they left in their wake — the LIGO project has extended our limited range of observation and suddenly brought a portion of the hidden universe into view.
Our reverence for men like Einstein often strengthens the misconception that only special minds can fully grasp the wonders of the universe. A generation of popular science writing argues otherwise. What modern science should do is encourage us to observe the world more closely. When we pay attention, or use the correct equipment, we can see much more than we think. The astronomer Neil Degrasse Tyson points out, for instance, that if our eyes could tune into microwave frequencies they would see a “remnant from the early universe, a wall of light set forth 380,000 years after the big bang”; if tuned to X-ray frequencies they would see “the locations of black holes, with matter spiraling into them”; gamma ray sensitive eyes would observe “titanic explosions scattered throughout the universe at a rate of about one per day.”
The LIGO discovery should remind us of how inattentive we have become, how distracted by the shallow end of technology – computers, cellphones, social media — how ignorant of the profusion of the natural world. Consider, for example, that although there are only 10,000 active taxonomists charting the world’s remaining terra incognita, and despite the expense, and drudgery involved in formally cataloguing a new species, we are still finding some 15,000 of them each year — even as thousands more are herded to extinction through our mismanagement of the planet. Life’s miracles abound, once we look in the right places. In The Diversity of Life, E O Wilson recounts how a single botanical expedition to Borneo once found a thousand new species of flowering plants – more than there are in all of North America.
Science used to be the province of the wealthy few but this is rapidly changing as basic equipment becomes cheaper. Indeed some of it has become so affordable that we may be at the dawn of a new golden age of amateur science. Stanford researchers who want to “democratize science” recently prototyped Foldscope, an optical microscope that can be printed and folded from a single flat sheet of paper, like a piece of origami. Imagine what a generation of Guyanese children could find if each of them owned a folding microscope, or could look through a reasonably powerful telescope. One reason for genuine optimism in our times is that these questions are becoming less hypothetical every day.
