American - Physicist | September 29, 1932 -
By the time we made the discovery in 2015, the National Science Foundation had put close to $1.1 billion into it.
Rainer Weiss
ScienceTimeFoundationDiscovery
Over years, the noise level will be brought down, and LIGO will be three times better and see three times farther.
BetterDownThreeWillOverSee
All of this technology wasn't available to Einstein. I bet he would've invented LIGO.
TechnologyAvailableBetHeInvented
Receiving money for something that was a pleasure to begin with is a little outrageous.
MoneyPleasureBeginLittle
We're going to be seeing things from regions in the universe where Einstein is the whole story. Newton you can forget about.
StoryUniverseYouSeeingForget
The concept of what we're looking for is so important. The fact that the effect is tiny is just our misfortune.
LookingImportantJustMisfortune
It's a spectacular signal. It's a signal many of us have wanted to observe since the time LIGO was proposed. It shows the dynamics of objects in the strongest gravitational fields imaginable, a domain where Newton's gravity doesn't work at all, and one needs the fully non-linear Einstein field equations to explain the phenomena.
WorkTimeGravityExplainFieldsUs
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.
MeasureTriumphNeverRightTheory
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.
StarsLightMovingNowGeometry
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.
MovingDirectionWaveYouFirstGet
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.
SpaceWavesEnergyEnoughLongYou
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.
ThinkingWaveYouNeverProjectSee
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