Gravitational Waves Embargo Broken Early By Celebratory Cake Picture On Twitter
One of the biggest scientific discoveries in decades was given away on Thursday by a celebratory cake from NASA.
Scientists confirmed that they had detected gravitational waves for the very first time, confirming Albert Einstein’s last big unproven theory.
While the news was delivered to the world at 15.30 GMT, many had been given the information under embargo ahead of the big reveal.
However, Erin Lee Ryan, a research associate at the University of Maryland who works at NASA’s Goddard’s Space Flight Center tweeted a picture of the celebratory cake 16 minutes before the announcement started.
The cake was iced with the giveaway message: ‘Here’s to the first direct detection of gravitational waves!’.
Amazingly, this isn’t the first time that the scientist has broken an embargo with a cake.
In 2013, she tweeted a photo of a cake celebrating the discovery of a chemical on one of Saturn’s moons.
She didn’t get into trouble as the tweet actually brought more attention to the discovery than the official press release, but she was told by bosses to stay away from Twitter for a while.
‘They told me to maybe chill with the tweeting for a week or so’, she told the Washington Post.
Ryan, who now describes herself as ‘infamous cake tweeting embargo breaker’ in her Twitter bio, hit back at critics, saying, quite reasonably: “Something to say about press embargoes: these are communicated to the press with the releases, not to every other person.”.
She also noted that others who tweeted the photo after her, but before the embargo had lifted were the not the focus of such attention.
The NASA scientist also pointed out that the backlash over the unfortunate cake-based incident had occurred on International Women In STEM day - a celebration of females working in science, technology, engineering and maths.
Ryan tweeted: “And trust me y'all: I notice that as a member of #WomenInSTEM that it’s the one woman getting the crap piled while dudes are clean.”.
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Image credit: Erin Lee Ryan/Twitter
