The Reuters report begins:
Astronomers announced on Monday that they had discovered what many consider the holy grail of their field: ripples in the fabric of space-time that are echoes of the massive expansion of the universe that took place just after the Big Bang.
Predicted by Albert Einstein nearly a century ago, the discovery of the ripples, called gravitational waves, would be a crowning achievement in one of the greatest triumphs of the human intellect: an understanding of how the universe began and evolved into the cornucopia of galaxies and stars, nebulae and vast stretches of nearly empty space that constitute the known universe.
"This detection is cosmology's missing link," Marc Kamionkowski, a physicist of Johns Hopkins University and one of the researchers on the collaboration that made the finding, told reporters on Monday at a press conference at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts."
The BBC story is one that emphasizes how important scientists think this is, and in the New Yorker, physicist Lawrence Krauss places it in historical context and explains some of the ramifications.
I've seen some more extravagant claims as to what it may mean (confirmation of the "multiverse" of infinite branches, which would mean human life exists elsewhere as well as here) but apparently this discovery also shuts down some theories as well. It will take scientists time to sort out the ramifications, as well as confirming this discovery.
What a wonder the human mind is, to come up with fundamental theories and what happened in the first one-trillionth of a second, or to get all excited by maybe spotting the first liquid waves on any other world, on Saturn's moon Titan. And meanwhile failing to act on the one bit of science that threatens everything that allows these theories and discoveries.
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