ONE of the reasons science is so powerful is its ability to predict the existence of things long before they can be confirmed by experiment. To take just the most recent, and famous, example, the existence of the Higgs boson was predicted on blackboards decades before it was finally run to ground by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.Now the physicists have done it again. Earlier today the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced that the BICEP-2 telescope at the South Pole had seen unambiguous evidence of the existence of gravitational waves. Predicted by Einstein's theory of relativity, these are ripples in the fabric of space itself.Assuming it stands the test of time (and a few physicists were already making sceptical noises, in the best sense of that word, on Twitter), the announcement is a big deal. Detecting gravitational waves has long been a goal of astrophysicists; a Nobel prize was handed out in 1993 for indirect proof of their existence. In fact, this is a scientific double whammy, for the particular type of gravitational wave that the telescope has detected provides strong evidence that physicists' ideas about how the universe came into being are true as well. Specifically, they provide direct physical evidence for the inflationary hypothesis, which holds that very shortly after the Big Bang, space itself went through a brief but dramatic period ...
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