On October 3, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded physicists Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Barry Barish the Nobel Prize in physics for directly detecting gravitational waves—wrinkles in space-time predicted more than a century ago by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, but which had been stubbornly elusive until 2015.

Judging from the fanfare that surrounded the first detection's 2016 announcement, this is perhaps the least surprising physics Nobel since 2013, when physicists François Englert and Peter Higgs won for theorizing the Higgs boson.

“For as long as 40 years, people have been thinking about this, trying to make a detection, sometimes failing in the early days, and then slowly but surely getting the technology