Rainer Weiss

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.

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

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.

The rule has been that when one opens a new channel to the universe, there is usually a surprise in it. Why should the gravitational channel be deprived of this?

The waves from all the different parts of a sphere would cancel each other out. You need motion that's nonspherical.

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

I said, suppose you take a light - I was thinking of just light bulbs because, in those days, lasers were not yet really there - and sent a light pulse between two masses. Then you do the same when there's a gravitational wave. Lo and behold, you see that the time it takes light to go from one mass to the other changes because of the wave.

The students on my course were fascinated by the idea that gravitational waves might exist. I didn't know much about them at all, and for the life of me, I could not understand how a bar interacts with a gravitational wave.

Many of us on the project were thinking if we ever saw a gravitational wave, it'd be an itsy bitsy little tiny thing; we'd never see it. This thing was so big that you didn't have to do much to see it.

A gravitational wave is a very slight stretching in one dimension. If there's a gravitational wave traveling towards you, you get a stretch in the dimension that's perpendicular to the direction it's moving. And then perpendicular to that first stretch, you have a compression along the other dimension.

The whole idea of gravity curling up space, that is the epitome of what is going on in a black hole. I would've loved to have seen Einstein's face if he were presented with the data that we actually discovered such a thing, because he himself probably didn't believe in much of it.

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.

It's a spectacular signal. It's a signal many of us have wanted to observe since the time LIGO was proposed. It shows the dynamics of objects in the strongest gravitational fields imaginable, a domain where Newton's gravity doesn't work at all, and one needs the fully non-linear Einstein field equations to explain the phenomena.

We were looking almost one-tenth of the way to the edge of the universe. We're planning to use the facilities we have to make improvements by another factor of 10... a strain sensitivity that is 10 times smaller. This means looking 10 times further out into the universe.

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

The obvious thing to me was, let's take freely floating masses in space and measure the time it takes light to travel between them. The presence of a gravitational wave would change that time. Using the time difference, one could measure the amplitude of the wave.

We've seen black holes, which is already wonderful. We also expect to see the merger of neutron stars, and that was a thing that actually gave this field a certain credibility when it was discovered that there were pairs of neutron stars in our galaxy, and people stopped laughing at us when that was found out.

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.

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.

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.