by Charles Mudede • Mar 5, 2021 at 10:00 am Shall we shake the universe? brightstars/gettyimages.com In the previous decade, there were only two major events in the science of physics. One was the detection of the Higgs boson by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012. (The particle was needed to explain why particles have mass.) The other big event occurred in our very own (radioactive) backyard, at Hanford's Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO). This mean machine (lasers, vacuums, mirrors), along with another one in the woods of Louisiana, can transform into sound the gravitational waves predicted in a mathematical model Albert Einstein formulated a decade after his special relativity. The cosmic ear of LIGO heard this small ripple across the medium of spacetime as a chirp in 2016.