einstein was right. his work was an improvement on what went before. we know this. it has been confirmed by many, many experiments and observations. and reported countless times with the same tedious headline.
please, use something a little more original.
"But astronomers hope that, before the collision, the spinning stars will help scientists test Einstein's general theory of relativity and even reveal the origins of an entire class of supernovae."
The title was undoubtedly written by some editor whose job is to drive traffic. Nothing to get so upset about. Most people are pretty ignorant about these sorts of things (myself included). That doesn't mean that I saw the title and was like "well finally they proved that mad man right."
However, scientists still observe, verify, measure. As one other poster mentioned, the equipment to detect gravity waves from afar has not yet been able to do the job (due to opportunity or sensitivity, don't know).
If for some reason they do not find the waves (and the instruments are shown to be good), then there will be some more deep thinking to do: were we really looking at objects different than what we thought? Is there some theory more twisted than relativity that needs to be made to explain the previous results as a special case and also explaining the new results???
i am not criticising the physicists, or the person who originally posted the article, or denying how interesting it would be if waves were not found, or disparaging the technical difficulties involved.
i am just tired of the same hackneyed phrase being used in every article related to general relativity. google has over 12 million hits for the phrase "einstein was right". the national geographic is a quality publication. it should know better.
Frame dragging is one example. There were several theories offering slightly different predictions in that field (that broke down to perfect identity for real-life situations), Einstein's GR being just one of them.
So, in physics it's like this: trust, but verify.
Einstein is less wrong; his work has smaller error bars than what went before. It's "sufficiently right to allow advances to be made".
See http://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html (by Isaac Asimov)
you are being exploited by journalists who are telling you attractive stories about "right" and "wrong" without giving any idea of their relative importance. einstein's work is now considered normal, boring, mainline physics. it's not controversial - in some areas it is being improved on (and i guess then we're going to see "einstein was wrong" which, again, does not reflect how science works),