The detection of gravitational waves is sometimes described as the Holy Grail of Modern Physics. This is somewhat of a misnomer. Like the search for the holy grail, the search has appeared endless and fruitless, especially to non-scientific observers who cannot believe that it could take so long to make a detector, test it and come up with a firm answer. But unlike the search for the holy grail, physicists know that gravitational waves exist, not only from the beauty and elegance of Einstein's General Theory which predicts their existence, but also from the observations of binary pulsar systems which lose energy exactly in accordance with the theoretical predictions. This work by Joseph Taylor was rewarded with the 1993 Nobel Prize in physics.

The saga of gravitational wave detection goes back a long way: Einstein believed they existed but thought they were not physically detectable. Eddington queried their existence: he suggested that ‘they travel at the speed of thought’. But in the 1950's Pirani, Feynman, Bondi and later Isaacson proved their physical reality, and in about 1960 Joseph Weber began to develop his famous resonant mass detectors. One now resides in the Smithsonian museum and another at one of LIGO's gravitational wave observatories. About 1970 his claims of detection (which turned out to be false) fired up a whole community.