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Rainer Weiss

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[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

The whole world tried to reproduce the Weber experiments.

Experiments

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

Father

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

Astronomy

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

Complicated

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

Gravitational

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

Gravitational

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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 are all enormously indebted to the National Science Foundation of the United States and the American public for steady support over…

American

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The fact that this radiation is so penetrating - nothing stops it - makes it so you can look for things that…

Forward

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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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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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You know the Einstein waves can be thought of as a distortion of space and time. But the way we see it,…

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 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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It's a spectacular signal. It's a signal many of us have wanted to observe since the time LIGO was proposed. It shows…

Gravity

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By the time 1967 had rolled around, general relativity had been relegated to mathematics departments... in most people's minds, it bore no…

General relativity

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

Albert einstein

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

Gravitational

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We expect surprises. There has to be surprises.

Expect

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

Money

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

Any

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

Astronomy

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Observing gravitational waves would yield an enormous amount of information about the phenomena of strong-field gravity. If we could detect black holes…

Amazing

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

Concept

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

Motion

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The triumph is that the waveform we measure is very well represented by solutions of these equations. Einstein is right in a…

Measure

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