From 1.3 billion light years away, the universe has spoken. On Feb. 11, a team of scientists led by the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced that they had detected gravitational waves from a collision in deep space. The news, confirming a 1915 theory of Albert Einstein about the ripple effect of space-time, generated tributes to the achievements of human reason.

Commenting in Science News, Tom Siegfried wrote that the breakthrough on gravitational waves demonstrates “the...