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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
The detection of gravitational radiation will not only be a milestone in scientific achievement; it will also be of immense cultural and philosophical significance. It will perhaps complete the process by which Western culture has gradually been forced to let go of its absolutist heresy. The heresy goes back to Aristotle and beyond. It is intimately tied up with the Judeo-Christian prejudice of an unchanging homocentric universe. It is epitomised by the ancient belief in a heavenly crystalline celestial sphere rigidly rotating and unchanging above us.
This heretical edifice has been tumbling slowly under the onslaught of scientific investigation. Newton gave us absolute space, but contributed to the demolition of the geocentric universe brought about by Galileo, Tycho, Kepler and Copernicus. Darwin discovered the impermanence of species; the plate tectonic theory gave us impermanent continents. Einstein demolished Newtonian absolute space and time, and gave us both spacetime curvature and the theory of gravitational radiation. The observation of gravitational radiation will demonstrate that spacetime not only curves predictably in the presence of matter, but is also subject to unpredictable perturbations as gravitational waves ripple through the universe.
Absolutism is surely connected with prejudice. The absolutist prejudice has led to a lingering battle in the case of Darwinism, and most relativists suffer minor irritations from the Einstein-was-wrong brigade. Tycho Brahe wrote of ‘his’ supernova in 1572:
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