American - Physicist | September 29, 1932 -
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.
Rainer Weiss
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We expect surprises. There has to be surprises.
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There was a person who thought I was OK. I wasn't a complete dope. I got some confidence out of that.
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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 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.
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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 knowledge, through gravitational waves, of what goes on in the universe.
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Most of us fully expect that we're going to learn things we didn't know about.
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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 ultimately got seen.
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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.
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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 between them. The presence of a gravitational wave would change that time. Using the time difference, one could measure the amplitude of the wave.
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The field equations and the whole history of general relativity have been complicated.
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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, 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.
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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 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.
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