The science of riding gravity waves

[Mike]

Many expect it to be one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs of our age: "There'll certainly be a Nobel Prize in it for somebody," says Jim Hough.

The UK professor is standing on a farm road in Lower Saxony, Germany, with a crop of beet on one side and sprouts on the other.

But the real interest lies at his feet - with some shabby, corrugated metal sheeting. For a moment, it looks like an upturned pig trough until you realise it stretches for hundreds of metres.

The sheeting hides a trench and, within it, the vacuumed tube of an experiment Hough believes will finally detect the most elusive of astrophysical phenomena - gravitational waves.

The Glasgow University scientist has been chasing these "ripples" in space-time for more than 30 years and feels certain he is now just a matter of months away from bagging his quarry.

"It will be a big event for two reasons: it will be yet another confirmation that Einstein's Theory of General Relativity is correct, but it will also open up a new kind of astronomy that will allow us to look inside the most violent events in the Universe."


FULL STORY - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4415722.stm

[Rick]

Interesting stuff.