Maybe the least interesting things about Einstein that po’s a bunch of believers is that — for all his understanding of the universe and “creation” — “God” is a fantasy. Until the discovery, announced today, that validates Einstein’s theory of gravitational waves.

Scientists announced Thursday that, after decades of effort, they have succeeded in detecting gravitational waves from the violent merging of two black holes in deep space. The detection was hailed as a triumph for a controversial, exquisitely crafted, billion-dollar physics experiment and as confirmation of a key prediction of Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.

It will also inaugurate a new era of astronomy in which gravitational waves are tools for studying the most mysterious and exotic objects in the universe, scientists declared at a euphoric news briefing at the National Press Club in Washington. ...WaPo

That Einstein feller goes on being right even though his theories are often challenged. He would love the challenge, I bet. He withstood a lot of crap from the right for his peacenik politics. Among other groups he admired was peace-loving Quakers/Society of Friends.

It must have been the summer of 1953 or ’54 when he invited some kids working for the American Friends Service Committee in eastern New Jersey for an afternoon of iced tea and cookies and conversation at his house on Mercer Street in Princeton.

I was one of those teenagers.

Somewhere along shelf up there is a black and white photo, faded and scratched, of the eight or ten of us, mostly dressed in shorts and shirts, clustered around the grinning, sparkling Einstein.

As host to a bunch of kids he was no longer Einstein but an eager contemporary wanting to know more about us, more about our supposed contribution to world peace. Of course, our “contribution” was… a fubar. We were there in part to help Kalmuk refugees settle into farms not far from Asbury Park. We were, for the most part, nothing but trouble.

I remember cleaning chicken runs. Cleaning meant 1) catching and moving the critters to a temporary shelter, then 2) shoveling all morning. At midday we returned to the farmhouse porch where a Kalmuk dad was preparing lunch. He grabbed up one of the hens we’d carried to new quarters that morning and separated head from body. We were hungry.

The scene was peaceful unless you were the hen. I don’t remember whether we told Einstein much about our bungling efforts. Maybe we did. That might account for the amusement on his face. Unless he was thinking about the disbelief conservatives would express when told about the clash of two black holes in outer space and the brilliance of a theorist they believed was in the grip of the Commies.

Cross-posted from Prairie Weather

Graphic by Yoytatela (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons