American - Physicist | September 29, 1932 - 5
The students on my course were fascinated by the idea that gravitational waves might exist. I didn't know much about them at all, and for the life of me, I could not understand how a bar interacts with a gravitational wave.
Rainer Weiss
LifeMeWavesWaveKnowUnderstand
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.
TimeLightThinkingWaveYouSaid
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.
TimeGrowWaveTryingYouClock
The waves from all the different parts of a sphere would cancel each other out. You need motion that's nonspherical.
WavesYouNeedOutMotionDifferent
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?
SurpriseUniverseNewWhyRuleBeen
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.
AmazingWavesBlackInformation
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.
ThoughtYearSeeSomethingWould
Over and over in the history of astronomy, a new instrument finds things we never expected to see.
HistoryNewNeverOverSeeThings
We'll have all sorts of crazy signals. And you'd be a damned fool if you didn't look for things you weren't expecting, because that's probably what you're going to see first.
FoolCrazyYouLookFirstSee
Copyright © 2024 QuotesDict Rainer Weiss quotes