Who was the biggest genius of all time? Me? Isaac Newton? Stephen Hawking? That taxi driver who won Mastermind? Leonardo da Vinci? Charles Darwin? Elvis?

Or Albert Einstein? ‘The Boss’, as I call him. Because quite frankly, where true ‘genius’ is concerned, pure ‘understanding’ of things that most even clever people barely understood to be actual ‘things’, Einstein is peerless. His record always spoke for itself. He scribbled out a few formulae in a coffee shop in Switzerland and re-invented Newton’s gravity for the post-industrial world. Ironed out the basic over-simplicities so that those laws became truly universal, rather than relating to mere worldly things like falling apples.

He then applied himself to relativity and explained something that no-one even knew existed.

In the following hundred years, during which they’ve invented all manner of massive computers, incredible telescopes, amazing measuring equipment (like the 15km particle accelerator at CERN), several thousand doctoral dissertations have set out to test the great man’s theories using all this new-fangled shit. And no-one has ever managed to disprove Einstein’s work. Produced on the back of a fag-packet in the Starbucks of its time. But without free wifi.

Only one of his theories remained untested. Because it was pretty much untestable. Gravitational waves. Ooooooooh. What are them? I have no idea. Nor a care. But they’ve finally found one and guess what? Einstein was right. Both in predicting their existence and in the way they’d work.

He just did the maths. You wanna test it? Go ahead. Make stuff to test it, see if I care.

So they did. They built a couple of perpendicular tunnels somewhere in America. Each 4kms long and containing amazingly precise lazar beams. So sensitive that they could detect a gravitational wave when it ‘hit’ the planet. And when I say ‘hit’, I’m not talking like an earthquake. Not like a Mike Tyson punch. They were looking for a movement in the beams of so many hundredths of a wavelength of light. If you think ‘the smallest thing I could ever imagine’, then divide that by about a million and you’re in the right ball-park.

Einstein 3; the entire technology and scientific knowledge of the entire humanity; nil.

There’s some other ball-parks that need considering this weekend. Less sort of ‘scientificky’ more kind of ‘footbally’. But more tomorrow.

Today was about a new discovery, or confirmation, so profound, so massive and all encompassing that we can almost re-write or correct the entire history of our universe right from the first second.

Tomorrow is much more important than that. Arsenal vs Leicester; Man City vs Spurs. Wow.

Happy, slightly nervous Saturday

A xxxx