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. Rainer Weiss Read Quote
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. Rainer Weiss Read Quote
I said, suppose you take a light – I was thinking of just light bulbs because, in those days, lasers were not yet really there – and sent a light pulse between two masses. Then you do the same when there’s a gravitational wave. Lo and behold, you see that the time it takes light to go from one mass to the other changes because of the wave. Rainer Weiss Read Quote
If the wave is getting bigger, it causes the time to grow a little bit. If the wave is trying to contract, it reduces it a little bit. So, you can see this oscillation in time on the clock. Rainer Weiss Read Quote
The waves from all the different parts of a sphere would cancel each other out. You need motion that’s nonspherical. Rainer Weiss Read Quote
The rule has been that when one opens a new channel to the universe, there is usually a surprise in it. Why should the gravitational channel be deprived of this? Rainer Weiss Read Quote
Observing gravitational waves would yield an enormous amount of information about the phenomena of strong-field gravity. If we could detect black holes collide, that would be amazing. Rainer Weiss Read Quote
When we initially proposed LIGO, the only sources that we were really contemplating were supernovae. We thought we would see something like one a year, maybe even ten a year. Rainer Weiss Read Quote
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. Rainer Weiss Read Quote
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. Rainer Weiss Read Quote
