In the desert north of Richland, scientists are betting their careers that a new field of science will be born, changing the way we see the universe.

Since 2001 they've been searching for evidence of a gravity wave from outerspace at LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.

Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves in his 1916 general theory of relativity. But in the 90 years since there's been no direct detection of a gravity wave.

The waves, caused by violent events in space, carry huge amounts of energy, but they're expected to be barely detectable with the best scientific instrumentation man has so far been able to develop.

The state of the detection art now is twin LIGO facilities, one at Hanford and the other in Louisiana. If both detect the barest movements of mirrors suspended at the end of 2.5-mile long tubes, scientists will know they've detected a gravity wave.

"We're in the discovery phase of the field of trying to detect traveling space warps," said Fred Raab, chief of the Hanford LIGO.

They're caused by an acceleration or change in direction of objects with the mass of the sun and moving near the speed of light, such as two neutron stars that orbit each other until gravity pulls them together and they collide.

That change creates a gravity wave, or a ripple through space and time.

The force is so great it could be felt on Earth. As it passes through it would stretch objects lengthwise and cause them to compress sideways; a circle would become an eclipse.

But the change would be barely detectable.

LIGO is trying to detect a movement about one thousandth of a diameter of a proton, which is the nucleus of a hydrogen atom. It would take 10 trillion such movements to equal the width of a human hair.

And it's trying to detect that among all the other movement or "noise" on Earth.

In the control room at Hanford, the screens that reach to the ceilings are covered with graphs that show, among other things, different measurements of movement.

It's all movement that scientists must sort through to find the movement that might be a space quake, much like trying to hear one beep among the static of a radio.

Ocean waves on the Pacific Coast can be detected. In the spring, the ground beneath the observatory trembles from the water coming over McNary Dam. A momentary arc from a power line as far away as central Idaho can be picked up as a pulse at the Hanford LIGO.

That's in part why Louisiana has a nearly identical facility. If movement is caused by a gravity wave, it should be detected at both LIGOs.

"It helps us determine what is a real signal and what is false," Raab said.

To detect a wave, the Hanford LIGO has mirrors suspended by fine wires at the end of two vacuum tunnels stretching out into the desert, one to the northwest and the other at a right angle to the southwest. A laser beam is split in half to travel down each leg of the tunnel and bounce back.

In the absence of a gravity wave that return light bounces off the beam splitter and goes back toward the laser.

A gravity wave, by changing the distances in the tunnels cause some of the return light not to go back to the laser, but to veer in a different direction.

Now most of what we know about the universe comes from some form of electromagnetic study. Astronomers have long used telescopes to view planets and stars.

More recently developed instruments like the X-ray telescope allow a look at cosmic electromagnetic waves with wavelengths different from light. They've helped astronomers to learn about quasars and pulsars.

But gravity waves have the potential to open up a whole new world of information about a universe that scientists now estimate contains mostly matter unlike that we're familiar with on Earth.

Unlike matter made up of protons, electrons and neutrons, it does not interact with electricity and magnetism.

"This gets us into a whole new way to see the universe," Raab said.

By detecting and measuring gravity waves with an entirely new type of observatory, scientists believe advances can be made in physics and astronomy.

Scientists could directly verify that gravitational waves do exist. They could confirm that black holes exist. They could detect the gravitational waves produced in the Big Bang explosion that may have created the universe.

But what they cannot now even guess at could be the most amazing discoveries or most significant benefits made through information from gravitational waves.

Raab asks, "Is the way we see the universe the way it is or is it the way we look" that has shaped our view of it?

It's an important enough question that the National Science Foundation has invested more than $500 million into the two LIGOs and their operation by the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Hanford LIGO is now looking for gravity waves that come from hundreds of millions of light years away, Raab said. It's an unfathomable distance. The distance to the moon is one light second and the distance to the sun is eight light minutes.

The task is made more difficult because the events that could cause a space quake detected on Earth are rare.

Based on models of how black holes and neutron stars form, Raab estimates there is a one in three chance that a gravity wave will be detected during LIGO's current run, which started in November and will end in September 2007.

At the end of this run, a year or two will be spent to modify LIGO to make it more sensitive. It should then be able to detect gravity waves from a volume of space 10 times as large as it can now.

That should give scientists a pretty good chance of discovering a gravity wave, Raab said.

"I hope we get a discovery by 2011," he said, after working on LIGO since it was just a concept in 1988.

Either way, the observatory will be shut down for a planned $200 million upgrade in the hope that it will give it the sensitivity it needs to detect events at the rate of several per year or even several per month.

Now LIGO does the sort of science that makes people shake their heads in disbelief, Raab said.

But he hopes that "in 100 years, they're going to think, 'What a crude, quaint device.' "