As a physicist (and retired local government CEO), two stories stood out for me this week. The first was the monumental discovery that gravitational waves exist. Physicists announced the discovery of gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of space-time. It was the climax of a century of speculation, 50 years of trial and error and 25 years perfecting a set of instruments so sensitive they could identify a distortion in space-time a thousandth the diameter of one atomic nucleus across a 4km strip of laser beam and mirror.

Using the world’s most sophisticated detector, the scientists listened for 20 thousandths of a second as the two giant black holes, one 35 times the mass of the sun the other slightly smaller, circled around each other.