1. Rainer Weiss is a professor of physics emeritus at MIT and an adjunct professor at LSU.
16 Facts About Rainer Weiss
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Rainer Weiss is best known for inventing the laser interferometric technique which is the basic operation of LIGO.
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Rainer Weiss was Chair of the COBE Science Working Group.
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In 2017, Weiss was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Kip Thorne and Barry Barish, "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves".
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Rainer Weiss has helped realize a number of challenging experimental tests of fundamental physics.
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Rainer Weiss is a member of the Fermilab Holometer experiment, which uses a 40m laser interferometer to measure properties of space and time at quantum scale and provide Planck-precision tests of quantum holographic fluctuation.
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Rainer Weiss was born in Berlin, Germany, the son of Gertrude Loesner and Frederick A Weiss.
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Rainer Weiss studied at MIT, dropping out at the beginning of his junior year with the excuse that he had abandoned his coursework to pursue a romantic relationship with a music student from Chicago.
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Rainer Weiss taught at Tufts University from 1960 to 1962, was a postdoctoral scholar at Princeton University from 1962 to 1964, and then joined the faculty at MIT in 1964.
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Rainer Weiss had an idea during this period regarding the building of a Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, but believed that such a machine could not be built with the then current technologies, because it could not "actually" be constructed with sufficient sensitivity.
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Rainer Weiss was then able to qualify for tenure and remain at MIT.
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Rainer Weiss brought two fields of fundamental physics research from birth to maturity: characterization of the cosmic background radiation, and interferometric gravitational wave observation.
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Rainer Weiss later became co-founder and science advisor of the NASA Cosmic Background Explorer satellite, which made detailed mapping of the radiation.
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Rainer Weiss pioneered the concept of using lasers for an interferometric gravitational wave detector, suggesting that the path length required for such a detector would necessitate kilometer-scale arms.
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Rainer Weiss built a prototype in the 1970s, following earlier work by Robert L Forward.
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Rainer Weiss co-founded the NSF LIGO project, which was based on his report "A study of a long Baseline Gravitational Wave Antenna System".