Trust me, you don't want to ever get near a gravitational wave.

Well, I should add some caveats to that, as is the usual Ask a Spaceman way of going about things.

You are technically near gravitational waves pretty much all the time.

They are waves of gravity, hence the name gravitational waves.

But if you've ever wondered why they're not just called gravity waves,

because that seems to make a lot more sense,

that's because by the time we figured out gravitational waves,

Einstein discovered them as soon as he developed relativity, like 1917 or so, he discovered that there can be waves of gravity.

The name gravity waves was already taken.

These are waves in the atmosphere that respond to the force of gravity, and they were called gravity waves.

So that name was already taken, so it had to be gravitational waves. But anyway, gravitational waves are waves of gravity. They are ripples in the fabric of

space time itself, the same way you might imagine waves on the surface of an ocean. And as the waves

pass over you, you move up and down. As a gravitational wave passes through you, it doesn't move

you up and down, but it squeezes you and pulls you in alternating directions. I know that's a

tiny bit harder to imagine. We know that waves can move in three dimensions. It's just really,

really hard to visualize it.

But do your best, and you'll get there, at least most of the way.

Anyway, these waves, these gravitational waves, slosh and crash through all of us every

single moment of every single day.

But we don't notice. And that's because gravity is by far the

weakest of the forces of nature. Even if it were a trillion times stronger than it is, it would

still be the weakest force. It takes the whole entire Earth to hold down a cup of coffee. And all

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