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How Richard Feynman Convinced The Naysayers 60 Years Ago That Gravitational Waves Are Real

“Just as a pulse of electromagnetic radiation would cause such charges to oscillate, the same would happen in the “gravitational antenna” if a gravitational wave passed through—with the maximum effect occurring if the wave were transverse: at right angles to the stick. Upon the impact of a gravitational wave, one of the masses would accelerate relative to the other, sliding back and forth along the stick. The rubbing movement would generate friction between the free mass and the stick, releasing heat in the process. Therefore the gravitational radiation must convey energy. Otherwise, how else did the energy arise?”

Today, we take the existence of gravitational waves for granted. They were predicted by Einstein almost immediately following the first publication of general relativity, they were indirectly detected decades ago and they’ve been directly detected multiple times by the different LIGO observatories. Yet Einstein and his former student argued, back from the 1930s through the 1950s, that the waves were mere mathematical artifacts, and didn’t physically exist. Oddly enough, it was the non-specialist in general relativity, Richard Feynman, who provided the key way of thinking which resolved the argument. Rather than arguing about the mathematical subtleties of relativity, he approached the problem from a physical perspective, reasoning about how gravitational waves would be able to accelerate “gravitational charges,” a.k.a. masses. The result not only demonstrated that gravitational waves must carry energy, but provided the prototype for the design of LIGO.

Thanks to physicist and historian Paul Halpern, the full story is now available for all to read of how Feynman demonstrated the reality of gravitational waves 60 years ago!