February 11th was a good day.
I spent the day at the "Dynamics and accretion at the Galactic Center" Conference at the Aspen Center for Physics, where about 75 physicists have spent the week talking about black holes and stuff.
This morning we watched the LIGO press conference, frantically deciphered the papers, and had a LIGO Science Collaboration member give us a very good rundown of what the situation is.
Over the last few months, LIGO has been making some very good outreach material to explain what is what:
LIGO: A Passion for Understanding a film by Kai Staats
LIGO: Generations
LIGO: PhD Comics!
More like this
"We hope that interested people will repeat our calculations and will make up their own minds regarding the significance of the results. It is obvious that "belief" is never an alternative to "understanding" in physics." -J. Creswell et al.
"What's really exciting is what comes next. I think we're opening a window on the universe -- a window of gravitational wave astronomy." -Dave Reitze, executive director of LIGO
"There was a long history of speculation that in quantum gravity, unlike Einstein's classical theory, it might be possible for the topology of spacetime to change." -Edward Witten
"Ladies and gentlemen, we have detected gravitational waves." -David Reitze