4 ms·

Sure, but that's an example of measuring something that's happening now. It's not quite in the same category as measuring something that happened 13.7 billion y

• sigmoid10 4y ago
  Well, first of all these gravitational wave-creating events happened billions of light years away and thus are already a way to view the universe billions of years ago. Going back and looking even further into the past is just an example of what seems impossible to us right now. But in the grand scheme of things, we have no clue what's possible as evidenced by the history of physics. On top of that, there are actually pathways towards understanding things like string theory or the big bang. Einstein by comparison was not disingenuous when he made that statement, since the theoretical and experimental work didn't even show a possible path to imagine the future. Of course that doesn't mean that these other things will pan out in the future (e.g. stuff like astronomically-sized colliders or mathematical bottom-up/top-down proof approaches), but saying that anything we do today definitely won't ever work out, no matter what, is either incredibly naive, misinformed or outright slanderous towards these areas of research.