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Rainer Weiss Quotes


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Quotes by Rainer Weiss

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The whole idea of gravity curling up space, that is the epitome of what is going on in a black hole. I would've loved to have seen Einstein's face if he were presented with the data that we actually discovered such a thing, because he himself probably didn't believe in much of it.

~Rainer Weiss

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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

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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.

~Rainer Weiss

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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

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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.

~Rainer Weiss

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Over and over in the history of astronomy, a new instrument finds things we never expected to see.

~Rainer Weiss

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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.

~Rainer Weiss

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We haven't found anything that we can't explain at all. I hope that will happen.

~Rainer Weiss

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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

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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

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Biography

Nationality: American

Type: Physicist

Born: September 29th, 1932

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