Rainer Weiss Quotes

Rainer Weiss

Profession : Physicist

Birth : September 29, 1932

The triumph is that the waveform we measure is very well represented by solutions of these equations. Einstein is right in a regime where his theory has never been tested before.

Rainer Weiss

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.

Rainer Weiss

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.

Rainer Weiss

A gravitational wave is a very slight stretching in one dimension. If there's a gravitational wave traveling towards you, you get a stretch in the dimension that's perpendicular to the direction it's moving. And then perpendicular to that first stretch, you have a compression along the other dimension.

Rainer Weiss

Space is much stiffer than you imagine; it's stiffer than a gigantic piece of iron. That's why it's taken so damned long to detect gravitational waves: to deform space takes an enormous amount of energy, and there are only so many things that have enough.

Rainer Weiss

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.

Rainer Weiss

The students on my course were fascinated by the idea that gravitational waves might exist. I didn't know much about them at all, and for the life of me, I could not understand how a bar interacts with a gravitational wave.

Rainer Weiss

I said, suppose you take a light - I was thinking of just light bulbs because, in those days, lasers were not yet really there - and sent a light pulse between two masses. Then you do the same when there's a gravitational wave. Lo and behold, you see that the time it takes light to go from one mass to the other changes because of the wave.

Rainer Weiss

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.

Rainer Weiss

Every time you accelerate - say by jumping up and down - you're generating gravitational waves.

Rainer Weiss

The waves from all the different parts of a sphere would cancel each other out. You need motion that's nonspherical.

Rainer Weiss

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?

Rainer Weiss

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.

Rainer Weiss

When we initially proposed LIGO, the only sources that we were really contemplating were supernovae. We thought we would see something like one a year, maybe even ten a year.

Rainer Weiss

Over and over in the history of astronomy, a new instrument finds things we never expected to see.

Rainer Weiss

We'll have all sorts of crazy signals. And you'd be a damned fool if you didn't look for things you weren't expecting, because that's probably what you're going to see first.

Rainer Weiss