How could gravitational waves provide information about the origin of the universe?
It’s likely that in the first one second of the life of the universe, there was a lot of violence going on. The universe was born in a gigantic explosion; it probably inflated extremely rapidly for a short time, and slightly later there may have been violent changes in the laws of nature, called phase transitions – all in that first one second. The birth, the inflation and the phase transitions may have generated a rich set of outgoing gravitational waves. Gravitational waves are the only kind of radiation that is so penetrating that it would emerge unscathed from this first one second of the universe, [bringing] us a picture of what was going on then. So the long-term goal is to use gravitational waves to study the earliest moments of the universe. What is your current research focus? My own current work is focusing on understanding black holes. For the first time, scientists are able to simulate colliding black holes on computers and watch the holes create wild oscillations in the fa
