Gravity waves detected

[Forever Sunshine]

This plot represents the twisting pattern in the polarization of light left over from the Big Bang.

There's no way for us to know exactly what happened some 13.8 billion years ago, when our universe burst onto the scene. But scientists announced Monday a breakthrough in understanding how our world as we know it came to be.
If the discovery holds up to scrutiny, it's evidence of how the universe rapidly expanded less than a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.
"It teaches us something crucial about how our universe began," said Sean Carroll, a physicist at California Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the study. "It's an amazing achievement that we humans, doing science systematically for just a few hundred years, can extend our understanding that far."
What's more, researchers discovered direct evidence for the first time of what Albert Einstein predicted in his general theory of relativity: Gravitational waves.
These are essentially ripples in space-time, which have been thought of as the "first tremors of the Big Bang," according to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
A telescope at the South Pole called BICEP2 -- Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization 2 -- was critical to the discovery. The telescope allowed scientists to analyze the polarization of light left over from the early universe, leading to Monday's landmark announcement.

www.cnn.com/2014/03/17/tech/innovation/big-bang-gravitational-waves/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

[Deleted]

I understand polarization, but not how it can 'twist'.....................how does that work? Im also unsure as to what Sean Carroll means by 'learning something crucial', as he doesnt say what that is,and why its 'crucial'...............any efforts to lighten m y darkness would be appreciated..............