Editor's Letter: Patience and perseverence

last updated 8 January 2015

The death of Osama bin Laden is a singular moment for the United States, but it’s also a reminder that even in our fast-twitch culture, perseverance still counts. Tracking down bin Laden involved the painstaking efforts of thousands of dedicated intelligence professionals over 10 years—under two administrations. Their success is a triumph of the “culture of persistence,” said journalist Bob Woodward, and it speaks to the best of who we are as a nation. The Navy SEAL team that took bin Laden down started the incredibly arduous training for that task years ago (see In-depth briefing).

Some successes take even longer; last week, we heard the results of an experiment begun 52 years ago that set out to confirm key components of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. In 1916, Einstein predicted that space and time (or space-time, as the physicists call it) can be warped and dragged by the gravity of large objects like planets; picture the Earth spinning in a jar of honey, twisting the space around it. NASA and Stanford University, in a $750 million project called Gravity Probe B, proved that “Einstein wins again,” said Scientific American. If this all sounds like pi in the sky stuff, it’s not. Work on the experiment has already provided technology that underpins Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) devices, has improved air-travel safety, and takes us further in our investigation of how the universe began. Epic accomplishments like this—or even a good education or a solid marriage—take patience and dedication, just as our parents told us. Or as Einstein himself put it, “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”