India Will Be Home To World's Biggest Science Project That Aims To Prove Einstein Wrong!

The site to set up an ultra-sensitive laser detector to find the elusive gravitational waves predicted by Einstein will be in Maharashtra, Rajasthan or Madhya Pradesh.

Proving Einstein wrong? 

An ironical twist has deprived Bengaluru - and Karnataka - of an opportunity to play a pivotal role in the biggest science project ever in the world. The project sets out to prove whether Albert Einstein was right or wrong - an objective which would either boost astrophysics or entirely change the way astrophysicists have been looking at it.

Despite having a large density of scientific and information technology institutions in and around Bengaluru, that very attraction - and resulting property development around the city - has eliminated not just Bengaluru but the entire state of Karnataka from the list of candidate sites to set up an extremely ultra-sensitive detector, called Laser Interferometry Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO). This detector sets out to detect a shift which is as short a distance as a fraction of the nucleus of an atom in the laser beam due to impacts of gravitational waves emanating from even billions of light-years away.

Two such detectors exist in the USA - one at Hanford near Richland, Washington; the other at Livingston near Los Angeles. One of them is to begin operations to detect gravitational waves this year. A third is to be set up in India to form a part of a global LIGO network to detect the gravitational waves. The Indian scientific institutions involved in this project are Inter University Centre for Astronomy & Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune; Institute of Plasma Research (IPR), Gandhinagar; Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology (RRCAT), Indore; the various institutions under the Indian Institutes of Science Education & Research (IISERs); and Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs).