Way OT: Gravitational Waves discovered???

For the uber-geeks out there, be sitting down:  Twitterverse (never known to be wrong) is abuzz with the suggestion that LIGO has detected gravitational waves.  To the non-geeks, this is a huge, major, really big scientific discovery.  It basically is a "check the box" of one of Einstein's major theories, which mostly had been assumed to be unprovable.

I can post a ton of links, or you can google it, but here's one link:  http://www.techinsider.io/gravity-waves-detected-rumor-2016-1

What's a gravitational wave?  The idea is, if a massive body (black hole, large star, etc.) undergoes a sudden movement -- like a cataclysmic explosion, or an impact with another equally-sized mass -- then a ripple will be created in its gravitational feels, for a brief moment.  Gravity travels across vast distances, so a gravitational wave, basically, can travel millions or billions of lightyears.

Only, gravity is so weak,* it was long assumed gravitational waves can't be detected.  Scientists, armed with big budgets, weren't to be deterred, and set out building huge experiments to detect them.  LIGO is the most famous.  IIRC, it's basically an L-shaped underground tunnel, many miles long, where a laser beam is split then travels down both legs and recombined.  If a gravitational wave were to pass through the Earth, it would affect the two legs different (being oriented differently), and the split laser beams when recombined would be out of phase.  You'd detect the wave -- if you could eliminate every other possible source of vibrations (e.g. trucks driving overhead).

* How weak is gravity?  It's (1 followed by 40 zeros) times weaker than electromagnetism. Put another way.  A single magnet the size of a pencil eraser can lift a paperclip off of a table; meaning, that tiny magnet exerts more force on the paperclip than does the gravity of our entire planet.

Should you care?  Discovering gravitational waves doesn't have immediate, practical implications, except that I'm sure HARBAUGH will use them to break down defensive fronts next season.  But this is a step towards confirming the basic building blocks of the universe.  There could be long-term research implications from this, and ultimately, if you wanted to build a signalling device to humans around other stars (or on long-duration interstellar missions), sending gravity waves is better than light signals b/c they travel so damn far.

Here we go again?  A year ago, there were rumors LIGO had discovered gravitational waves.  The idea was debunked by the scientists on the project, and the rumor died down.  It seems that TODAY, the rumors are exploding in the scientific community, and they aren't being debunked by the scientists involved -- just, you know, "still checking the data."

Still...pretty cool.  Even if this doesn't come to pass, it's a neat window for non-scientists into the cutting edge stuff that our technology, and budgets, is able to achieve.  It seems that these kind of "aha!" moments are coming more and more for us now.