This is the moment a scientist was told evidence had been found proving a theory he first put forward more than 30 years ago.
When Andrei Linde and his wife Renata Kallosh – a theoretical physicist – open the door to their California home, Chao-Lin Kuo, an assistant professor of physics at Stanford, immediately tells them that that his life’s work has been vindicated.
Prof Linde is regarded as the founding father of inflation theory, the belief that the universe rapidly inflated in the first infinitesimal moment of the universe’s history after the Big Bang.
Yesterday the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics announced that it had detected ripples – or gravitational waves – in the fabric of space-time.
The discovery was heralded as the ‘Holy Grail’ of cosmology, as the miniscule ripples carry energy across space and were the last untested aspect of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Russian-born Prof Linde, who first described chaotic inflation in 1983, was understandably emotional after being informed of the discovery.
‘If this is true, this is a moment of understanding of nature of such a magnitude that it just overwhelms,’ he said. ‘Thank you so much for doing it.’