Einstein's Theory Verified: Gravitational Waves

So scientists have found evidence of gravitational waves, as predicted by Einstein 100 years ago as part of his theory of general relativity, but what are they?  And how do you find them? 

The second part is easy - all you need are two black holes next to each other.  Yes, the very objects Einstein also predicted yet cannot be seen - black holes - are essential to finding the gravitational wave. 

But back to the first question.  Gravitational waves are ripples in space time.  And what is space time?  Well, that would be a combination of the regular three dimensions plus the fourth dimension of time. 

And where did they spot these gravitational waves?  They came from two intersecting black holes 1.3 billion light years away. 

And how did we notice these waves?  We measured them with special equipment illustrated below by Science magazine.  That's right, we are measuring something 1/10,000th the width of a proton - don't try this at home.

I recommend two videos that explain this latest discovery, both from PBS's online series Space Time.  The first was broadcast last year titled Have Gravitational Waves Been Discovered?!? and the second was just released titled LIGO's First Detection of Gravitational Waves!  All your questions will be answered.

"I think we have it"

With that statement, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director general of CERN, announced the existence of the elusive Higgs-like particle.

So what does it all mean?  Here is how CERN describes the situation in its July 4 press release: 

The Standard Model describes the fundamental particles from which we, and every visible thing in the universe, are made, and the forces acting between them. All the matter that we can see, however, appears to be no more than about 4% of the total. A more exotic version of the Higgs particle could be a bridge to understanding the 96% of the universe that remains obscure.

So, in other words we have now found about 96 percent of the universe.  I guess that helps to fill the gap in our knowledge.  London's The Guardian put it high on the list of scientific achievements: 

The discovery of the Higgs particle ranks as one of the most important scientific advances of the past 100 years. It proves there is an invisible energy field that pervades the vacuum of the known universe. This field is thought to give mass to the smallest building blocks of matter, the quarks and electrons that make up atoms. Without the field, or something like it, there would be no planets, stars, or life as we know it.

The BBC covers the topic well in this documentary.  The story adds some useful context to the topic.

Update:  Slate magazine has a good analogy for explaining Higgs bosom:

Imagine a room full of physicists. Suddenly Einstein enters and attempts to cross the room, but the star-struck physicists cluster around him and impede his movements, effectively increasing his mass. Now imagine that I enter the room. As a lowly grad student, nobody wants to interact with me, so I pass through the physicists relatively unimpeded—no effective mass for me! Lastly, imagine that somebody whispers a rumor, causing the physicists to cluster together excitedly on their own.

In this analogy, the room full of physicists represents the Higgs field in space, Einstein represents a particle with high mass, I represent a particle with low mass (or no mass), and a cluster of physicists represents an excitation of the field, which is effectively a Higgs boson.