Lifeboat Foundation

This unlikely story begins back in the 1960s, when Isaacson was a doctoral student and got interested in one of Albert Einstein’s predictions.

In 1916, Einstein theorized that any time two massive objects crash together, shock waves should move through the very fabric of the universe. These gravitational waves through space and time are like the ripples you see in water when you toss in a pebble.

“For my thesis, I showed how gravitational waves behave like other kinds of waves, like light and radar, X-rays,” Isaacson says.