With the discovery of the first ever evidence of gravitational waves recently, Einstein's General Theory of Relativity was further confirmed. Even Albert himself was hesitant to support the existence of them even though his own Theory predicted them. Double-crossed by himself!
The evidence and the extreme engineering, computations and effort to find them is truly a remarkable tale. It is summed up well in this Salon article, especially for us Physics-challenged peons.
I hope to hear from our Group's Physics advisers about what this means for the Quantum Theory, String Theory and Dr. Brown's DeLorean.
Update: I asked Ron Moore how this affects quantum physics, if at all? (General Relativity and Quantum Physics cannot be merged. The Universal Theory still eludes us. And String Theory laughs at all of us!)
Ron Moore:
If you mean "Do we now have a complete quantum field theory of everything?", the answer is no. It's another beautiful confirmation of general relativity - extremely strong gravity, but not on tiny (Planck-length) distance scales where quantum gravity effects become important. Nevertheless, making the first *direct* observation of gravitational waves is Nobel-worthy. One can make a limit on the graviton mass (the quantum particle of gravity, akin to the photon for electromagnetism), and they do it in the paper, but it doesn't improve on limits from other indirect means.