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Rainer Weiss

57 quotes in 189 categories

[Wikipedia] Rainer Weiss was a German-American physicist, known for his contributions in gravitational physics and astrophysics. He was a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an adjunct professor at Louisiana State University. He is best known for inventing the laser interferome

Quotes by Rainer Weiss

Gravitational waves, because they are so imperturbable - they go through everything - they will tell you the most information you can…

Everything

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The waves travel with the velocity of light and slightly squeeze and stretch space transverse to the direction of their motion. The…

Black hole

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

Important

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You think Earth's gravity is really something when you're climbing the stairs. But, as far as physics goes, it is a pipsqueak,…

Earth

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We've seen black holes, which is already wonderful. We also expect to see the merger of neutron stars, and that was a…

Astronomy

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We know about black holes and neutron stars, but we hope there are other phenomena we can see because of the gravitational…

Astronomy

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We were looking almost one-tenth of the way to the edge of the universe. We're planning to use the facilities we have…

Edge

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It's very, very exciting that it worked out in the end that we are actually detecting things and actually adding to the…

End

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For reasons probably related to the popular vision of Albert Einstein and, also, the threat posed by black holes in comic books…

Amazing

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The whole idea of gravity curling up space, that is the epitome of what is going on in a black hole. I…

Believe

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The obvious thing to me was, let's take freely floating masses in space and measure the time it takes light to travel…

Change

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All at once, funding was gone due to the Mansfield Amendment, which was a reaction to the Vietnam War. In the minds…

More

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The whole world tried to reproduce the Weber experiments.

Experiments

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

Father

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

Discovery

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

College

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

Anything

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Many of us on the project were thinking if we ever saw a gravitational wave, it'd be an itsy bitsy little tiny…

Never

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I said, suppose you take a light - I was thinking of just light bulbs because, in those days, lasers were not…

Go

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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,…

Crazy

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When we initially proposed LIGO, the only sources that we were really contemplating were supernovae. We thought we would see something like…

Maybe

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

Education

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This is the first real evidence that we've seen now of high gravitational field strengths: monstrous things like stars moving at the…

Astronomy

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I didn't understand the Weber bar and how gravitational waves interacted with it. I sat and thought about it over a weekend,…

Monday

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

Available

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Rainer Weiss by topic

Waves (9) Time (9)