Rainer Weiss

“We expect surprises. There has to be surprises.”

“I thought that there must be an easier way to explain how a gravitational wave interacts with matter: If one just looked at the most primitive thing of all, 3D floating masses out in space, and look at how the space between them changed because of the gravitational wave coming between them.”

“By the time we made the discovery in 2015, the National Science Foundation had put close to $1.1 billion into it.”

“The whole world tried to reproduce the Weber experiments.”

“The field equations and the whole history of general relativity have been complicated.”

“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.”

“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.”

“My parents were singularly uninterested in me. My father was too self-centered and too busy with his own practice to pay a lot of attention to me, and my mother was probably deflected more by my sister.”

“We're going to be seeing things from regions in the universe where Einstein is the whole story. Newton you can forget about.”

“Over years, the noise level will be brought down, and LIGO will be three times better and see three times farther.”

“The waves from all the different parts of a sphere would cancel each other out. You need motion that's nonspherical.”

“The triumph is that the waveform we measure is very well represented by solutions of these equations. Einstein is right in a regime where his theory has never been tested before.”

“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.”

“What was done is measure directly, with exquisitely sensitive instruments, gravitational waves predicted about 100 years ago by Albert Einstein. These waves are a new way to study the universe and are expected to have significant impact on astronomy and astrophysics in the years ahead.”

“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.”

“One of the things I sort of dreamt about awhile ago is that if Einstein were still alive, it would be absolutely wonderful to go to him and tell him about the discovery, and he would have been very pleased, I'm sure of that.”

“We live in an epoch where rational reasoning associated with evidence isn't universally accepted and is, in fact, in jeopardy. That worries me a lot.”