I remember learning about the LIGO experiment back when it was being built, a decade ago, and at the time it seemed so amazing: a giant tube of vacuum, sealed underground and so sensitive that it could detect animals walking nearby, listening to the moving and twisting of space itself… I guess we&#x27;re finally seeing that with immense human ingenuity and the most careful of engineering, the universe will offer its secrets up to us.<p>This also means that between LIGO and ATLAS&#x2F;CMS, the last few years have screwed in the final screws on two of the big physics advances of the 20th century: quantum field theory and general relativity are now both experimentally complete, and both look nearly unassailed in their correctness. The next steps for physics look increasingly abstruse: understanding the exceptional cases, like black holes, holography, and the fundamentally computational form of the universe. It&#x27;s an exciting time, and it looks more and more like we&#x27;re close to the very bottom, since we have to look so far now to find anything outside our models.