A round-up of major events in science and technology
Breaking News - Science & Technology 2016 may have been gruelling for some, with the political shockwaves of Brexit and the election in the US of Donald Trump, not to mention a spate of celebrity deaths.
But it was a big year for those engaging the tools of empirical science to better understand the natural universe around us.
In fact, 2016 kicked off with one of the biggest discoveries of this century so far: the detection of gravitational waves by an international team of scientists, including several from Australia.
Fortuitously enough, this came almost precisely 100 years after Albert Einstein predicted such waves ought to exist, and is a testament to the power of the scientific method. Based on the observations of his day, along with the power of mathematics and his inspired imagination, Einstein was able to describe a phenomenon that it was impossible for him to test.
Yet the dogged persistence of scientists in the intervening century enabled them to build a detector with a sensitivity that boggles the mind: it could spot a wobble in the fabric of spacetime that was 10,000 times smaller than the width of a proton.
Yet, in light of this profound discovery, we still don’t teach Einstein’s theories in high school.
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