It's Friday, July 8th, 2016, and you're listening to Inquiring Minds. I'm Injavis Gantis.

And I'm Kishore Hari. Each week, we bring you a new in-depth exploration of the space where science, politics, and society collide.

We endeavor to find out what's true, what's left to discover, and why it all matters.

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Indre, what do you think the sound of the universe is?

And before you answer, this isn't one of those trick questions, like the sound of one hand clapping or if a tree falls in the forest.

Do you think the universe has a sound?

Well, again, as a psychologist, I think sound is something that happens in your brain.

So it depends what aspect of the universe.

That is the least fun answer possible.

Because we're used to the idea of there's a vacuum in space.

So how can there possibly be sound?

But we found sound of the universe recently in terms of the LIGO gravitational wave detection last year. This is obviously

international news. This is going to be one of the biggest discoveries of 2016, if not the

biggest discovery in physics this decade, because it validates general relativity, which is a

theory everyone's heard of.

So this is such an important discovery, but what is so strange about it to me is that the

discovery had an audible sound in the human spectrum.

And that still blows me away.

Do you want to take a lesson?

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