Celebrating The Discovery Of Gravitational Waves — On Cover

In 1915, as part of his General Theory of Relativity, physicist Albert Einstein predicted that gravity would behave as a warping of spacetime, and predicted that gravitational waves — "ripples" — would emerge in the interaction of extremely massive objects in space.

Einstein explicitly stated that we would never be able to measure this behavior, but he underestimated advancements in measurement technology.

On February 11th, 2016, researchers from LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravity-Wave Observatory, which the California Institute of Technology was key to organizing) announced the observations of these waves — predicted more than one hundred years previously in that seminal paper by Albert Einstein — when two black holes were observed colliding.

I live right around the corner from CalTech. I watched the webcast with breathless excitement this morning and scurried to design cachets before work. On my lunch break, I drove to the post office most convenient to the campus and had six covers serviced, each featuring one stamp from Scott #3409 "Probing the Vastness of Space".

I put up a slideshow at collectpostmarks.com. Here are scaled-down scans that fit within the 200kB limit.

These are now definite favorites in my postmark collection. I couldn't be happier.

Almost as good as the discovery itself! Congrats!

Peter

Very nice!

Cool! Did they do the cancels themselves or did they let you do them?

Petert4522 and blcjr: Thanks!


"Cool! Did they do the cancels themselves or did they let you do them?"

Oh, they did them, KGB, and just barely. I had to sweet-talk my way into having them do hand-back cancels for me at all.

To their credit, they did them well!

Agreed! Every postmark is legible, and a couple are almost perfect.

mcgeesorg -- I applaud you for creating those very fine covers and getting them officially stamped as a unique commemoration of the truly remarkable historic scientific event! I would consider them a fitting memorial to perhaps the greatest scientific mind of all time.

Personally, I jumped up from my seat when I heard the news, yesterday, of the proving of Einstein's space wave theory. It brought me back to 7:29 a.m. April 18, 1955 when I was a junior high school student, and had just opened the door to leave for school, when our local TV news caster announced "We have a bulletin from Princeton, New Jersey. Stay tuned for the news with Dave Garroway on the Today Show." I knew it had to be news about Albert Einstein, who lived in Princeton where he headed the Institute for Advanced Studies. Like countless millions of people worldwide, I admired Einstein so much that I dreaded what I feared that news might be.

Sure enough, there was skinny, bespeackled Dave Garroway, reporting the new lead story: "Ladies and Gentlemen, We have just received a news bulletin. The headline is just now being posted to our board." There was a man in shirt sleeves actually placing black letters to a white wall board (That's the way it was, in 1955!): EINSTEIN DIES AT AGE 76

Hoxsie454, thank you for the kind words and for sharing your moving story from 1955. Obviously Einstein's death had a tremendous effect on you — as, indeed, did this new observation.

While nowhere near a sufficient memorial to the greatness of Dr. Einstein (nor the LIGO research teams), I'm glad to know that the covers at least show what was intended: an homage to and a commemoration of a century of amazing human achievement.

I framed them this morning, and they are now displayed proudly on the wall of my living room.