Whether you're a paleontologist digging for fossils, or a cosmologist staring into the depths of the universe, some knowledge is simply lost to time.

Like, no matter how much we look at dinosaur bones, we'll just never see a dinosaur sneeze. And we'll never truly know just how many would-be planets Jupiter flung out of our solar system.

Those moments have passed and your feelings of FOMO are valid. But it turns out, that thanks to gravity the universe itself has, like, a sort of memory. Massive objects leave subtle but lasting marks in the fabric of spacetime, like grooves on a vinyl record. So far, we can't play those memories back like a record, but scientists do have a starting point for where to look for them.

And as out technology improves, these messages carved in spacetime could help us get to the bottom of some of the universe's biggest mysteries.

Just like a bunch of other brain-bendy cosmological phenomena, the idea that the universe has some kind of memory traces its roots back to Einstein's theory of general relativity. In 1916, Einstein predicted that an object with any amount of mass should give off gravitational waves as it accelerates through spacetime. In other words, it should pinch and stretch the fabric of space itself, much like the ripples moving across the surface of a pond. Except the kind of pinching and stretching we can detect here on earth is a far, far more subtle effect.

I'm talking, like, subatomic scales. So scientists didn't actually detect gravitational waves until 2015, but that didn't stop them from trying way earlier than that. Take the physicist Joseph Weber; back in the 1950s and 60s, he constructed giant aluminum bars that were supposed to act like tuning forks, and were meant to start vibrating as soon as a strong enough gravitational wave washed over them. In 1969, Weber declared that he'd finally detected the signals he was looking for, which set the physicists scrambling.

People all over the world built their own giant tuning forks to see if they could reproduce Weber's cosmic hum, but there was nothing but silence. No gravitational waves, nothing to be heard, except for Weber's insistence that his signals were real. So a few years into this particular scientific tea, one pair of physicists were like, "Okay, let's ignore Weber's results for a moment and lets just calculate how sensitive would a device like this need to be in order to detect gravitational waves?"