57 Quotes by Rainer Weiss

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.

We know about black holes and neutron stars, but we hope there are other phenomena we can see because of the gravitational waves they emit.

Every time you accelerate - say by jumping up and down - you're generating gravitational waves.

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.

Space is much stiffer than you imagine; it's stiffer than a gigantic piece of iron. That's why it's taken so damned long to detect gravitational waves: to deform space takes an enormous amount of energy, and there are only so many things that have enough.

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

Einstein had looked at the numbers and dimensions that went into his equations for gravitational waves and said, essentially, 'This is so tiny that it will never have any influence on anything, and nobody can measure it.' And when you think about the times and the technology in 1916, he was probably right.

I prefer really often to talk to high school students, mostly because I think they're the future for us.

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.