Ripples on a Cosmic Sea

Shortlisted, Historical and Critical Studies Prize, Western Australian Premier's Book Awards 1998 Most people live and work entirely oblivious to the fact that a myriad of ghostly ripples are passing through them all the time. Generated in the depths of space by colliding stars and black holes, exploding supernovas and the turmoil that lies in the hearts of quasars, these so-called gravitational waves are literally ripples in the fabric of space itself. Sweeping across the cosmos at the speed of light, they encode vital clues about the exotic systems that produced them. The existence of gravitational waves was predicted by Einstein eighty years ago, but scientists have yet to detect them in the laboratory, as the waves are almost inconceivably feeble in their physical effects. A typical gravitational waves from an exploding star will trigger a vibration on Earth no larger than that caused by a pin dropped on the other side of the planet. Now the race is on to build the first successful gravitational wave antenna, a device that will pick up gravitational waves as a radio antenna picks up radio waves. To meet this challenge, physicists and astronomers have