The detection of gravitational waves is a monumental discovery. It's also only the first step.
Professor Graham Woan, one of the international team of scientists who worked on the breakthrough, told Sky News it was similar to Galileo looking through the telescope at the night for the first time.
The point was not that our understanding of the universe has been upended, as it was in the Scientific Revolution, but that we have a new tool - a new technology - for exploring our cosmos. Now, we have a gravitational telescope.
The LIGO array has been shown to work; upgrades will only make it more effective. We'll be able to peer back much further in time, to just after the start of the universe. We'll be able to test our theories and come up with new ones.
It's almost a side note, such is the scale of the discovery, that this is the first time we've ever been able to observe a black hole directly. We got two for the price of one, as they collided some 1.3 billion years ago.
And who knows where else gravitational waves will lead? Radio waves were first predicted in the 1860s by James Clerk Maxwell, a physicist, then discovered by Hertz. Some 150 years later, they underpin our lives from radio to television to mobile phones. The modern world wouldn't function without them.
Gravitational waves, although much weaker than radio, could have unexpected and vital uses down the line.
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