57 Quotes by Rainer Weiss

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

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.

I wasn't unpopular. I didn't have any trouble getting girls.

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

The whole world tried to reproduce the Weber experiments.

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.

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.

The waves travel with the velocity of light and slightly squeeze and stretch space transverse to the direction of their motion. The first waves we measured came from the collision of two black holes each about 30 times the mass of our sun.

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.