Rainer Weiss Quotes

Rainer Weiss

Profession : Physicist

Birth : September 29, 1932

I prefer really often to talk to high school students, mostly because I think they're the future for us.

Rainer Weiss

My parents were singularly uninterested in me. My father was too self-centered and too busy with his own practice to pay a lot of attention to me, and my mother was probably deflected more by my sister.

Rainer Weiss

People say, 'I failed out of college! My life is over!' Well, it's not over. It depends on what you do with it.

Rainer Weiss

I wasn't unpopular. I didn't have any trouble getting girls.

Rainer Weiss

My father was a dictator in the true German sense. He suppressed my mother.

Rainer Weiss

The whole world tried to reproduce the Weber experiments.

Rainer Weiss

I thought that there must be an easier way to explain how a gravitational wave interacts with matter: If one just looked at the most primitive thing of all, 3D floating masses out in space, and look at how the space between them changed because of the gravitational wave coming between them.

Rainer Weiss

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.

Rainer Weiss

The waves travel with the velocity of light and slightly squeeze and stretch space transverse to the direction of their motion. The first waves we measured came from the collision of two black holes each about 30 times the mass of our sun.

Rainer Weiss

What was done is measure directly, with exquisitely sensitive instruments, gravitational waves predicted about 100 years ago by Albert Einstein. These waves are a new way to study the universe and are expected to have significant impact on astronomy and astrophysics in the years ahead.

Rainer Weiss

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.

Rainer Weiss

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.

Rainer Weiss

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.

Rainer Weiss

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.

Rainer Weiss

Experimentally, we now have demonstrated that Einstein's theory is right in strong gravitational fields. That's important to a lot of people.

Rainer Weiss

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.

Rainer Weiss

One of the things I sort of dreamt about awhile ago is that if Einstein were still alive, it would be absolutely wonderful to go to him and tell him about the discovery, and he would have been very pleased, I'm sure of that.

Rainer Weiss

The fact that this radiation is so penetrating - nothing stops it - makes it so you can look for things that you have never seen before, and you can look at things you know in a way that's new. That is really the big step forward.

Rainer Weiss

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.

Rainer Weiss

We expect surprises. There has to be surprises.

Rainer Weiss