Rainer Weiss

Rainer Weiss (born September 29, 1932, Berlin, Germany) German-born American physicist who was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and for the first direct detection of gravity waves. He won half the prize, with American physicists Kip S. Thorne and Barry C. Barish sharing the other half.

Weiss’s father, Frederick Weiss, was a Jewish neurologist, and his mother, Gertude Loesner, was a Christian actor. Shortly before Rainer’s birth, Frederick Weiss testified in court against a Nazi doctor who had performed a botched operation. Weiss’s father was abducted by Nazis, but Loesner managed to use her political connections to get him released. Frederick Weiss left Germany for Czechoslovakia, and Loesner joined him shortly after Rainer’s birth. After the announcement of the Munich Agreement in September 1938, which allowed Germany to invade the Czechoslovakian Sudetenland, the Weiss family obtained a visa to come to the United States. They arrived in America in January 1939.

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As a teenager, Weiss became interested in electronics and specifically in audio systems. He was vexed by the problem of how to suppress the hiss that dominated recordings of slow, quiet pieces of classical music. He realized that he needed more mathematical and engineering knowledge to solve the problem, so he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to major in electrical engineering. However, after his second year, he switched to physics because that major had fewer required courses. In his third year, embroiled in a love affair that ended unhappily, he flunked out of MIT.

In 1953 Weiss got a job as a technician in the lab of MIT physicist Jerrold Zacharias, who encouraged him to resume his education. He eventually received a bachelor’s degree and a doctorate from MIT, in 1955 and 1962 respectively.

From 1960 to 1962, Weiss worked at Tufts University, where he was an instructor and then an assistant professor of physics. He was a research associate at Princeton University from 1962 to 1964, where he worked with physicist Robert Dicke and became interested in general relativity and cosmology. He returned to MIT as an assistant professor in 1964 and remained there for the rest of his career. He became a full professor in 1973 and retired in 2001.

Weiss’s career was focused mainly on two phenomena, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and gravitational radiation. Beginning in the 1970s, he worked on projects to study the CMB, the microwave radiation left over from the big bang, first using balloons and then with the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, which was launched in 1989. COBE discovered the slight density fluctuations in the universe that would have allowed galaxies to form. (Two COBE scientists, John Mather and George Smoot, won the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physics for this work.)

Weiss’s first attempt to search for gravitational radiation was at Princeton, where he studied the normal modes of Earth’s vibration, which would be excited by gravity waves from the cosmos in the Brans-Dicke theory of gravitation. However, the experimental measurements were dominated by vibrations from the Alaska earthquake of 1964.

American physicist Joseph Weber announced in 1969 that he detected gravity waves by measuring the change in length of two aluminum bars. Gravity waves are a disturbance in space-time and thus change distances when they pass by. However, no one could replicate Weber’s result. Weiss believed that a laser interferometer had the necessary sensitivity to make the measurement. In this instrument, a laser beam is split to travel down two perpendicular arms several kilometers long to mirrors at the end. When the laser beams return, they cancel out. However, when a gravity wave passes through the interferometer, the distance the light travels is longer in one path than the other and the light beams no longer cancel out. Weiss considered every possible noise source and in 1972 wrote a report describing how such an instrument would work. He also built a small prototype with arms only 1.5 metres long.

During the 1970s Weiss worked with physicists at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany, on a 3-metre and, later, a 30-metre prototype. He received a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to do a feasibility study for a gravitational-wave observatory. In 1983 he presented the results to the NSF with Thorne and Ronald Drever of Caltech. The NSF agreed to go forward with the LIGO project as an MIT-Caltech collaboration under the leadership of Weiss, Thorne, and Drever.

The LIGO project grew and was placed under a single director in 1987. Construction on two 4-km-long interferometers at Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, began in 1994. Test observations began in 2001, and upgrades to LIGO, Advanced LIGO, were completed in 2014. In 2015, observations began, and on September 14 the instrument detected gravity waves from two black holes 1.3 billion light-years away coalescing to form a new, larger black hole.