Grand Unification

Ripples in space time, something Einstein dreamed about when formulating General Relativity back in 1905, was considered to be a lock but without proof, gravitons remained forever theoretical and elusive, kind of like the Higgs Boson, "we know it's there but we can't prove it." notion until now.

Using the Bicep2 telescope, scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and other institutions discovered that microwave radiation coming from the early universe exhibits a type of polarization that is expected to result from primordial gravitational waves, the scientists said. These waves — ripples in the fabric of space and time — became imprinted on the shape of the universe during “inflation,” a period of rapid expansion during the universe’s first instant.

Implications of this research boggles the mind as 

1. Guth's theory of inflation (to explain why the universe is homogenous in texture) is valid.
2. Gravitons, the quantum carriers of the gravitational force, most likely exist, and work, in similar fashion, to photons, the quantum carriers of electromagnetism, which means...
3. A possible grand unification of quantum mechanics to relativity, a goal Einstein pursued in vain until his death in 1955, now becomes possible because of the fact gravity is most likely a quantum entity like the three other forces seen in nature, the strong, weak and electromagnetic.
4. The Multiverse, a theory independently proposed by Hugh Evertt, Andrei Linde, David Deutsch and Bryce De Witt among significant others, becomes ever more plausible as inflation is not only seen to be real and eternal but also to be fractal in nature, able to spawn multiple universes without issue. 

Rounding out the known laws of physics with an extra ingredient called “supersymmetry” causes three of the forces of nature to attain equal strengths at high energies. New results suggest that inflation happened at exactly the energy where this “grand unification” of the forces would occur.

Last but not least, here is a beautiful diagram of the history of "our' universe. :)