Rainer Weiss Quotes

Rainer Weiss

Profession : Physicist

Birth : September 29, 1932

There was a person who thought I was OK. I wasn't a complete dope. I got some confidence out of that.

Rainer Weiss

By the time 1967 had rolled around, general relativity had been relegated to mathematics departments... in most people's minds, it bore no relation to physics. And that was mostly because experiments to prove it were so hard to do - all these effects that Einstein's theory had predicted were infinitesimally small.

Rainer Weiss

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.

Rainer Weiss

Most of us fully expect that we're going to learn things we didn't know about.

Rainer Weiss

We knew about black holes in other ways, and we knew about neutron stars - well, those are the two things that ultimately got seen.

Rainer Weiss

Einstein had looked at the numbers and dimensions that went into his equations for gravitational waves and said, essentially, 'This is so tiny that it will never have any influence on anything, and nobody can measure it.' And when you think about the times and the technology in 1916, he was probably right.

Rainer Weiss

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.

Rainer Weiss

All at once, funding was gone due to the Mansfield Amendment, which was a reaction to the Vietnam War. In the minds of the local RLE administrators, research in gravitation and cosmology was not in the military's interest, and support was given to solid-state physics, which was deemed more relevant.

Rainer Weiss

The field equations and the whole history of general relativity have been complicated.

Rainer Weiss

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.

Rainer Weiss

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.

Rainer Weiss

By the time we made the discovery in 2015, the National Science Foundation had put close to $1.1 billion into it.

Rainer Weiss

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.

Rainer Weiss

Over years, the noise level will be brought down, and LIGO will be three times better and see three times farther.

Rainer Weiss

All of this technology wasn't available to Einstein. I bet he would've invented LIGO.

Rainer Weiss

Receiving money for something that was a pleasure to begin with is a little outrageous.

Rainer Weiss

We haven't found anything that we can't explain at all. I hope that will happen.

Rainer Weiss

We're going to be seeing things from regions in the universe where Einstein is the whole story. Newton you can forget about.

Rainer Weiss

The concept of what we're looking for is so important. The fact that the effect is tiny is just our misfortune.

Rainer Weiss

It's a spectacular signal. It's a signal many of us have wanted to observe since the time LIGO was proposed. It shows the dynamics of objects in the strongest gravitational fields imaginable, a domain where Newton's gravity doesn't work at all, and one needs the fully non-linear Einstein field equations to explain the phenomena.

Rainer Weiss