Gravitational waves: will the global south provide the next pulse of gravity research?

Amanda Weltman, University of Cape Town and Jeff Murugan, University of Cape Town

A little over a century ago, on 25 November 1915, Albert Einstein published a paper entitled “Die Feldgleichungen der Gravitation”. Its contents would change the world forever.

Like any good scientific theory, Einstein’s General Relativity not only explained the shortcomings of its predecessor, in this case Newtonian gravity, it also made predictions of new and unexpected phenomena. These included the bending of light by massive objects, the existence of black holes, the slowing down of time in strong gravitational fields and the very framework for the cosmology of the universe. All of these have withstood a century of intense scrutiny. But for 100 years one particular prediction in Einstein’s theory of Gravity eluded the most ingenious testing.

That changed on 11 February 2016 with the news that gravitational waves have been discovered.…