Once when I was invited to dinner at his house, I was asked to bring my cello and had to sight-read several cello sonata movements (rather shakily) with Weiss at the piano. He’s quick on the uptake, good at spotting the key points and problems, and authoritative enough to get others – physicists, engineers and funders on his side.
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He walked out a few minutes later with a copy of that plot, and the next thing I knew, he was using it in talks to the National Science Foundation when arguing for an upgrade to LIGO Livingston’s seismic isolation system. I’d just made a graph of the results, and I was in the control room staring at it when Weiss walked in. The tough thing back then was just gathering enough data from the seismometers to be able to make a meaningful comparison between the noise levels.
When I was working at the LIGO lab at Livingston, I did an early systematic comparison of seismic noise between the two LIGO sites in a key frequency range. But this informality and enthusiasm only just conceals his razor-sharp instinct for physics, particularly for sources of background noise and for electronics.Īnd, because he is what I would call “scientifically sociable”, Weiss naturally tends to learn things quickly by talking to people. Weiss has a refreshingly informal approach to physics, which is particularly helpful in encouraging others in their work, especially the young. LIGO measures these fluctuations by monitoring two light beams travelling between pairs of mirrors down pipes running in different directions. Gravitational waves, predicted by Einstein in 1916, travel across our universe at the speed of light – stretching space in one direction and shrinking it in the direction that is at right angles. I also know the recipients personally, in particular Weiss, who is a friend as well as a colleague.
I’m pleased to see this achievement recognised on behalf of the thousands of scientists who work on LIGO, including the University of Sheffield group. The scientists, all from the LIGO/VIRGO collaboration, conceived and played major roles in realising the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, which first detected the waves in September 2015. Half of the £825,000 prize sum will go to Rainer Weiss of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the other half will be be shared by Kip Thorne of Caltech and Barry C Barish, also at Caltech. The Swedish Academy of Sciences has announced that the 2017 Nobel prize in Physics goes to three scientists for their foundational work leading to the discovery of ripples in the fabric of space and time known as gravitational waves.
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