Over and over in the history of astronomy, a new instrument finds things we never expected to see. Rainer Weiss Read Quote
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. Rainer Weiss Read Quote
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. Rainer Weiss Read Quote
By the time we made the discovery in 2015, the National Science Foundation had put close to $1.1 billion into it. Rainer Weiss Read Quote
All of this technology wasn’t available to Einstein. I bet he would’ve invented LIGO. Rainer Weiss Read Quote
Receiving money for something that was a pleasure to begin with is a little outrageous. Rainer Weiss Read Quote
We haven’t found anything that we can’t explain at all. I hope that will happen. Rainer Weiss Read Quote
We’re going to be seeing things from regions in the universe where Einstein is the whole story. Newton you can forget about. Rainer Weiss Read Quote
The concept of what we’re looking for is so important. The fact that the effect is tiny is just our misfortune. Rainer Weiss Read Quote
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. Rainer Weiss Read Quote
