It was a century ago that Albert Einstein had suggested that gravitational ripples through the universe like a stone disturbing the surface of a pond  could be generated and sent by large-scale cosmic violence—two black holes colliding, for example.

For the first time Einstein has been proven right after physicists in the U.S. conclusively detected gravitational waves.

Two physicists in Amsterdam have started a company betting they can build a wave observatory which might lead to finding oil and gas even though it can be safel assumed that Einstein wasn’t thinking anything on these lines.

Looking like a box with a golf tee sticking out of it, Innoseis’s prototype seismic sensor, not much bigger than a fist. The lightweight, wireless technology can replace its standard surveying equipment, hopes Royal Dutch Shell which is testing Innoseis’s sensors. Strung together with 6,000 miles of cable, each of Shell’s $100 million seismic explorations requires about 100,000 11-pound sensors.

In theory the oil company would be able to deploy 1 million 1-pound sensors, covering much more ground, for the same price made possible by Innoseis’s model, which is stomped into the ground every few yards.

However Innoseis’s path was obvious only in retrospect.

Attracted by the scientific and engineering challenge, the hunt for gravitational waves was joined by Johannes van den Brand, an astrophysicist at the Dutch National Institute for Subatomic Physics, in 2006. Mark Beker, a half-Dutch New Zealander with a master’s in applied physics was persuaded by Johannes van den Brand to pursue a Ph.D. in seismicity and gravitational-wave detection in 2009.

It was tricky to detect how gravitational waves warp 3D space as the ripples are tiny. 0.000000000000000001 meter, or about one ten-thousandth the width of a proton is the level sensitiveness that the instruments must possess. And the earth is a terrible place to look for the waves due to the constant rattle and hum.

Beker and Van den Brand ended up designing some lightweight seismic sensors after they went looking for such devices and instruments. Wim Walk, a physicist who manages Shell’s seismic oil-hunting technology got attracted to their research in 2012. Groningen, where natural gas extraction has been linked to seismic activity, was the area where the company needed to investigate earthquakes near its facilities there. The instruments had to be small, cheap, and tough enough to survive extreme temperatures, or the occasional truck wheel as suggested by Walk.

Innoseis’s equipment is still being tested by the company. A software system that dramatically shrinks power demand (and thus weight and cost) by switching on gear only when it needs to time-stamp fresh data coupled with an analog instrument that measures ground movement constitutes the prototype.

Beker says that a way to learn things about the nature of the universe is offered by Einstein’s gravitational waves. He adds that astronomy was “like watching a symphony play without sound,” until now.

“It’s like, all of a sudden, somebody turns on the music. You get to understand so much more. You get to see so much more,”  he says.

Including, perhaps, a lot more oil.

(Adapted from Bloomberg)