Quotes from Rainer Weiss

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.

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.

We haven't found anything that we can't explain at all. I hope that will happen.

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

Over and over in the history of astronomy, a new instrument finds things we never expected to see.

Why do you do science? In this particular case, we don't have a very good reason to be doing this except for the knowledge that it brings. This research is especially important to young people. We all want to know what's going on in the universe.

Experimentally, we now have demonstrated that Einstein's theory is right in strong gravitational fields. That's important to a lot of people.

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

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

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

By the time 1967 had rolled around, general relativity had been relegated to mathematics departments... in most people's minds, it bore no relation to physics. And that was mostly because experiments to prove it were so hard to do - all these effects that Einstein's theory had predicted were infinitesimally small.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

The whole world tried to reproduce the Weber experiments.

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.

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 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 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.

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