Rainer Weiss, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Kip Thorne and Barry Barish, both of the California Institute of Technology, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday for the discovery of ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves, which were predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago but had never been directly seen.

For those of you who are wondering what exactly gravitation waves are, they are analogous to the electromagnetic spectrum (light, radiation, etc.) except for time-space. I think it’s hard to overstate it how important this discovery is. We won’t know its repercussion for years, but this is going to lead to an entire branch of science and technology. Imagine living during the period when we were first learning about optics and how to manipulate light. How quickly these researchers got the prize following their discovery speaks to the weight (pun intended) all of this as well.