Watch The Touching Moment When Physicist Andrei Linde Learns That His Theories on the Big Bang Were Finally Validated

On Mon­day, the sci­ence world joy­ous­ly cel­e­brat­ed a sem­i­nal astro­physics dis­cov­ery. Using a tele­scope in the South Pole, researchers from the Har­vard-Smith­son­ian Cen­ter for Astro­physics detect­ed rip­ples in the fab­ric of space-time, called grav­i­ta­tion­al waves. These waves con­firmed the infla­tion the­o­ry, which stat­ed that for a brief moment — one tril­lionth of a tril­lionth of a tril­lionth of a sec­ond after the big bang — the uni­verse was vio­lent­ly expand­ing faster than the speed of light. Stanford’s Andrei Linde (along with MIT’s Alan Guth) was one of the thinkers respon­si­ble for work­ing out this the­o­ry in the 1980s. In the video above, anoth­er Stan­ford pro­fes­sor, Chao-Lin Kuo, vis­its Linde to break the news of the dis­cov­ery to him on his front porch. Find­ing out that much of his career had been vin­di­cat­ed in such spec­tac­u­lar fash­ion, Linde was appro­pri­ate­ly moved and stunned. You can learn more about Lin­de’s work in The Stan­ford Report.

via Dai­ly Dot

Ilia Blin­d­er­man is a Mon­tre­al-based cul­ture and sci­ence writer. Fol­low him at @iliablinderman, or read more of his writ­ing at the Huff­in­g­ton Post.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

60 Sec­ond Adven­tures in Astron­o­my Explains the Big Bang, Rel­a­tiv­i­ty & More with Fun Ani­ma­tion

Mea­sur­ing the Uni­verse: How Astronomers Learned to Mea­sure Celes­tial Dis­tances Explained with Ani­ma­tion

The Hig­gs Boson, AKA the God Par­ti­cle, Explained with Ani­ma­tion

Free Online Physics Cours­es

Free Online Astron­o­my Cours­es