Einstein Saw Space Move, Long Before We Could Hear It

VPM | By Linda Wertheimer

Published February 13, 2016 at 12:22 PM EST

Updated October 10, 2024

Here we are in an election year — once again asking the great see-into-the-future question in politics — who will be the next president?

Yesterday, I picked up the paper (I still have a paper to pick up) and read about a man who did see into the future, Albert Einstein. He developed his theory of general relativity in the early 20th century, and in 1915, he announced his theory that space and time are woven together and that events in the universe can cause space and time to move, to bob and jiggle, to stretch and ripple. Einstein’s ideas overturned previous ideas of an orderly universe where planets and solar systems revolved in a calm and eternal magnificence.

And this particular notion — of space and time moving — was, you might say, out there, and not possible to observe.

Now, 100 years later, this most mysterious piece of Albert Einstein’s imaginings has reached out to scientists on Earth in the form of a chime, a chirp, a sound which one scientist described as what you might hear if you ran your thumb over piano keys from the lowest rumbly bass to middle C. A chirp in C, which left a distant part of the universe more than a billion years ago and rippled outward, beginning a journey to a very different Earth.

An extraordinary group of scientists, starting in the ’70s, began work on ways to listen to the universe and perhaps to hear the sound of space and time moving, bending. Over the years, three men, Ronald Drever and Kip Thorne of Cal Tech, and Rainer Weiss of MIT, searched for a way to detect the movement that by this time most scientists believed in but could not observe.

They built a most improbable pair of instruments, one in Washington State, and one in Louisiana called the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory — huge tubes and mirrors which could detect and measure impossibly tiny shifts in space and time. And last September, they did.

Two huge black holes fell into one another more than a billion years ago and rattled space and time. And in September, scientists heard that sound and recorded it. It is impossibly impressive, a very great achievement. But one of the things we must celebrate is that 100 years ago, a funny looking little fellow with flyaway hair trained his powerful brain on the universe and imagined what might be true. And was right.

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Linda Wertheimer

As NPR's senior national correspondent, Linda Wertheimer travels the country and the globe for NPR News, bringing her unique insights and wealth of experience to bear on the day's top news stories.

A respected leader in media and a beloved figure to listeners who have followed her three-decade-long NPR career, Wertheimer provides clear-eyed analysis and thoughtful reporting on all NPR News programs.

Before taking the senior national correspondent post in 2002, Wertheimer spent 13 years hosting of NPR's news magazine All Things Considered. During that time, Wertheimer helped build the afternoon news program's audience to record levels. The show grew from six million listeners in 1989 to nearly 10 million listeners by spring of 2001, making it one of the top afternoon drive-time, news radio programs in the country. Wertheimer's influence on All Things Considered — and, by extension, all of public radio — has been profound.

She joined NPR at the network's inception, and served as All Things Considered's first director starting with its debut on May 3, 1971. In the more than 40 years since, she has served NPR in a variety of roles including reporter and host.

From 1974 to 1989, Wertheimer provided highly praised and award-winning coverage of national politics and Congress for NPR, serving as its congressional and then national political correspondent. Wertheimer traveled the country with major presidential candidates, covered state presidential primaries and the general elections, and regularly reported from Congress on the major events of the day — from the Watergate impeachment hearings to the Reagan Revolution to historic tax reform legislation to the Iran-Contra affair. During this period, Wertheimer covered four presidential and eight congressional elections for NPR.

In 1976, Wertheimer became the first woman to anchor network coverage of a presidential nomination convention and of election night. Over her career at NPR, she has anchored ten presidential nomination conventions and 12 election nights.

Wertheimer is the first person to broadcast live from inside the United States Senate chamber. Her 37 days of live coverage of the Senate Panama Canal Treaty debates won her a special Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University award.

In 1995, Wertheimer shared in an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton Award given to NPR for its coverage of the first 100 days of the 104th Congress, the period that followed the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress.

Wertheimer has received numerous other journalism awards, including awards from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for her anchoring of The Iran-Contra Affair: A Special Report, a series of 41 half-hour programs on the Iran-Contra congressional hearings, from American Women in Radio/TV for her story Illegal Abortion, and from the American Legion for NPR's coverage of the Panama Treaty debates.

in 1997, Wertheimer was named one of the top 50 journalists in Washington by Washingtonian magazine and in 1998 as one of America's 200 most influential women by Vanity Fair.

A graduate of Wellesley College, Wertheimer received its highest alumni honor in 1985, the Distinguished Alumna Achievement Award. Wertheimer holds honorary degrees from Colby College, Wheaton College, and Illinois Wesleyan University.

Prior to joining NPR, Wertheimer worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation in London and for WCBS Radio in New York.

Her 1995 book, Listening to America: Twenty-five Years in the Life of a Nation as Heard on National Public Radio, published by Houghton Mifflin, celebrates NPR's history.

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