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 Read Quote
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. Rainer Weiss Read Quote
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. Rainer Weiss Read Quote
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. Rainer Weiss Read Quote
Most of us fully expect that we’re going to learn things we didn’t know about. Rainer Weiss Read Quote
All at once, funding was gone due to the Mansfield Amendment, which was a reaction to the Vietnam War. In the minds of the local RLE administrators, research in gravitation and cosmology was not in the military’s interest, and support was given to solid-state physics, which was deemed more relevant. Rainer Weiss Read Quote
The field equations and the whole history of general relativity have been complicated. Rainer Weiss Read Quote
Experimentally, we now have demonstrated that Einstein’s theory is right in strong gravitational fields. That’s important to a lot of people. Rainer Weiss Read Quote
We’ve seen black holes, which is already wonderful. We also expect to see the merger of neutron stars, and that was a thing that actually gave this field a certain credibility when it was discovered that there were pairs of neutron stars in our galaxy, and people stopped laughing at us when that was found out. Rainer Weiss Read Quote
