Rainer Weiss Quotes

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

"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."

"For reasons probably related to the popular vision of Albert Einstein and, also, the threat posed by black holes in comic books and science fiction, our gravitational wave discoveries have had an amazing public impact."

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

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

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

"The whole world tried to reproduce the Weber experiments."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"We expect surprises. There has to be surprises."

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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