Brian Greene Breaks Down Einstein’s Theory of Gravitational Waves for Stephen Colbert

Ear­li­er this month, we gave you this news bul­letin: “sci­en­tists announced that they had record­ed the sound of two black holes col­lid­ing a bil­lion light years away, pro­vid­ing the first real proof that grav­i­ta­tion­al waves actu­al­ly exist–something Albert Ein­stein pre­dict­ed 100 years ago in his famous paper on gen­er­al rel­a­tiv­i­ty.” This news actu­al­ly gets much more inter­est­ing if you wrap your minds around the whole con­cept of Grav­i­ta­tion­al Waves, which is exact­ly what physi­cist Bri­an Greene–fea­tured on this site many times before–set out to do when he appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Col­bert last week. Watch his visu­al-rich expla­na­tion above, and you’ll start get­ting a hang of the con­cepts. Below, for extra cred­it, you can watch anoth­er pop­u­lar­iz­er of sci­ence, Neil deGrasse Tyson, tak­ing his own stab at explain­ing this phe­nom­e­non.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Grav­i­ta­tion­al Waves Sound Like: New Audio of Black Holes Col­lid­ing Con­firms Pre­dic­tions Ein­stein Made 100 Years Ago

Free Online Physics Cours­es, part of our larg­er col­lec­tion, 1150 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

Grav­i­ty Visu­al­ized by High School Teacher in an Amaz­ing­ly Ele­gant & Sim­ple Way