Andrei Linde, a professor in the Department of Physics at Stanford University, is one of the main authors of the inflationary universe theory, that the universe underwent a brief but remarkably accelerated expansion immediately following the Big Bang.
Today, scientists announced that they’ve found direct evidence of primordial gravitational waves, which would provide a “smoking gun” for inflation, and also tell us when inflation took place and how powerful the process was.
Above is a scientifically heartwarming video of Linde being told of the gravitational wave discovery by Chao-Lin Kuo, also from Stanford University, the designer of the BICEP2 detector that made the discovery.