Rainer Weiss

“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.”

“My father was a dictator in the true German sense. He suppressed my mother.”

“The concept of what we're looking for is so important. The fact that the effect is tiny is just our misfortune.”

“Receiving money for something that was a pleasure to begin with is a little outrageous.”

“For reasons probably related to the popular vision of Albert Einstein and, also, the threat posed by black holes in comic books and science fiction, our gravitational wave discoveries have had an amazing public impact.”

“People say, 'I failed out of college! My life is over!' Well, it's not over. It depends on what you do with it.”

“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.”

“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.”

“We knew about black holes in other ways, and we knew about neutron stars - well, those are the two things that ultimately got seen.”

“All of this technology wasn't available to Einstein. I bet he would've invented LIGO.”

“There was a person who thought I was OK. I wasn't a complete dope. I got some confidence out of that.”

“Most of us fully expect that we're going to learn things we didn't know about.”

“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.”

“You know the Einstein waves can be thought of as a distortion of space and time. But the way we see it, we see it as a distortion of space. And space is enormously stiff. You can't squish it; you can't change its dimensions so easily.”

“Gravitational waves, because they are so imperturbable - they go through everything - they will tell you the most information you can get about the earliest instants that go on in the universe.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“We are all enormously indebted to the National Science Foundation of the United States and the American public for steady support over close to 50 years.”