David Blair (Australian scientist working on gravitational wave detection) had this to say about it:
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"The detection of gravitational waves will not only be a milestone in scientific achievement; it will also be of immense cultural and philosophical significance. It will perhaps complete the process by which Western culture has gradually been forced to let go of its absolutist heresy. The heresy goes back to Aristotle and beyond. It is intimately tied up with the Judeo-Christian prejudice of an unchanging homocentric universe. It is epitomised by the ancient belief in a heavenly crystalline celestial sphere rigidly rotating and unchanging above us.
This heretical edifice has been tumbling slowly under the onslaught of scientific investigation. Newton gave us absolute space, but contributed to the demolition of the geocentric universe brought by Galileo, Tycho, Kepler and Copernicus. Darwin discovered the impermanence of species; the plate tectonic theory gave us impermanent continents. Einstein demolished Newtonian absolute space and time, and gave us both spacetime curvature and the theory of gravitational radiation. The observation of gravitational radiation will demonstrate that spacetime not only curves predictably in the presence of matter, but is also subject to unpredictable perturbations as gravitational waves ripple through the universe.
Absolutism is surely connected with prejudice. The absolutist prejudice has led to a lingering battle in the case of Darwinism, and most relativists suffer minor irritations from the Einstein-was-wrong brigade. Tycho Brahe wrote of 'his' supernovae in 1572:
During my walk contemplating the sky here and there,... behold, directly overhead a certain strange star was suddenly seen, flashing its lights with a radiant gleam. Amazed, and as if astonished and stupefied I stood still... I was led into such a perplexity by the unbelievability of the object that I began to doubt the faith of my own eyes.
His prejudice is transparent and seems naive. This shows how far we have gone today in giving up absolutism. Yet absolutism still exists in the world, and in social contexts such as issues of race and religion contributes much unhappiness. Ultimately society will absorb a world view that is free of absolutism. One aspect will include the fact that spacetime itself is stochastic. We will move closer to the Buddhist world view of anita, impermanence. In absorbing the truth about out universe we will surely come to a deeper knowledge of our place in existence."
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