Coming Down From the Clouds: On Academic Writing

On February 11, a team of scientists announced that they had recorded the sound made by two black holes colliding. Despite all the noise in the universe, their sensitive equipment found evidence of ripples in space-time, a core element in Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. It was an amazing testament both to the power of the human imagination and to the daily work of basic scientific research. It took decades of painstaking effort, and the commitment of scientists who spent their careers seeking to understand something most of us did not even know was being studied.