The vision, persistence, and leadership of Ronald Drever, Kip Thorne, and Rainer Weiss, along with the contributions of a thousand collaborators between The LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration, led to the first detection of gravitational waves, not only validating a key prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity but inaugurating a new method for studying cosmology, in particular the workings of astronomical objects exhibiting the greatest gravitational effects in the universe.
