Words matter. These are the best Rainer Weiss Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I didn’t understand the Weber bar and how gravitational waves interacted with it. I sat and thought about it over a weekend, trying to prepare for the lecture for the following Monday. I asked myself how would I do it. The simplest way… was a thought experiment.
Receiving money for something that was a pleasure to begin with is a little outrageous.
For reasons probably related to the popular vision of Albert Einstein and, also, the threat posed by black holes in comic books and science fiction, our gravitational wave discoveries have had an amazing public impact.
If the wave is getting bigger, it causes the time to grow a little bit. If the wave is trying to contract, it reduces it a little bit. So, you can see this oscillation in time on the clock.
It’s very, very exciting that it worked out in the end that we are actually detecting things and actually adding to the knowledge, through gravitational waves, of what goes on in the universe.
We were looking almost one-tenth of the way to the edge of the universe. We’re planning to use the facilities we have to make improvements by another factor of 10… a strain sensitivity that is 10 times smaller. This means looking 10 times further out into the universe.
I wasn’t unpopular. I didn’t have any trouble getting girls.
The waves from all the different parts of a sphere would cancel each other out. You need motion that’s nonspherical.
This is the first real evidence that we’ve seen now of high gravitational field strengths: monstrous things like stars moving at the velocity of light, smashing into each other, and making the geometry of space-time turn into some sort of washing machine.
The obvious thing to me was, let’s take freely floating masses in space and measure the time it takes light to travel between them. The presence of a gravitational wave would change that time. Using the time difference, one could measure the amplitude of the wave.
We knew about black holes in other ways, and we knew about neutron stars – well, those are the two things that ultimately got seen.
The whole idea of gravity curling up space, that is the epitome of what is going on in a black hole. I would’ve loved to have seen Einstein’s face if he were presented with the data that we actually discovered such a thing, because he himself probably didn’t believe in much of it.
All of this technology wasn’t available to Einstein. I bet he would’ve invented LIGO.
My father was a dictator in the true German sense. He suppressed my mother.
The concept of what we’re looking for is so important. The fact that the effect is tiny is just our misfortune.
We are all enormously indebted to the National Science Foundation of the United States and the American public for steady support over close to 50 years.
Observing gravitational waves would yield an enormous amount of information about the phenomena of strong-field gravity. If we could detect black holes collide, that would be amazing.
By the time we made the discovery in 2015, the National Science Foundation had put close to $1.1 billion into it.
The rule has been that when one opens a new channel to the universe, there is usually a surprise in it. Why should the gravitational channel be deprived of this?
Over and over in the history of astronomy, a new instrument finds things we never expected to see.
There was a person who thought I was OK. I wasn’t a complete dope. I got some confidence out of that.
Many of us on the project were thinking if we ever saw a gravitational wave, it’d be an itsy bitsy little tiny thing; we’d never see it. This thing was so big that you didn’t have to do much to see it.
We haven’t found anything that we can’t explain at all. I hope that will happen.
We expect surprises. There has to be surprises.
The whole world tried to reproduce the Weber experiments.
We know about black holes and neutron stars, but we hope there are other phenomena we can see because of the gravitational waves they emit.
We live in an epoch where rational reasoning associated with evidence isn’t universally accepted and is, in fact, in jeopardy. That worries me a lot.
We’ve seen black holes, which is already wonderful. We also expect to see the merger of neutron stars, and that was a thing that actually gave this field a certain credibility when it was discovered that there were pairs of neutron stars in our galaxy, and people stopped laughing at us when that was found out.
You know the Einstein waves can be thought of as a distortion of space and time. But the way we see it, we see it as a distortion of space. And space is enormously stiff. You can’t squish it; you can’t change its dimensions so easily.
Gravitational waves, because they are so imperturbable – they go through everything – they will tell you the most information you can get about the earliest instants that go on in the universe.
The field equations and the whole history of general relativity have been complicated.
You think Earth’s gravity is really something when you’re climbing the stairs. But, as far as physics goes, it is a pipsqueak, infinitesimal, tiny little effect.
Why do you do science? In this particular case, we don’t have a very good reason to be doing this except for the knowledge that it brings. This research is especially important to young people. We all want to know what’s going on in the universe.
