Rainer Weiss Quotes

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.

A little bird told me that jumping is easy and the falling is fun, right up until you hit sidewalk shivering and stunned.

What goes up must come down.

The factor most ignored in discussing interstellar flight is the kinetic energy that must be invested in the ship to make its tons of matter move at a substantial fraction of the speed of light.

Acceleration is finite, I think according to some laws of physics.

Weight, force and casual impulse, together with resistance, are the four external powers in which all the visible actions of mortals have their being and their end.

I always found it satisfying that gravity was described by Einstein's geometric theory of general relativity.

You might expect gravity would slow it down, but it's just expanding faster and faster.

The same law takes place in a system, consisting of many bodies, as in one single body, with regard to their persevering in their state of motion or of rest. For the progressive motion, whether of one single body or of a whole system of bodies, is always to be estimated from the motion of the center of gravity.

Things changed with the discovery of neutron stars and black holes - objects with gravitational fields so intense that dramatic space and time-warping effects occur.

When gravitational waves reach the earth, the waves stretch and squeeze space. This is a tiny stretch and squeeze. Far too small to detect with ordinary human senses.

You can be only a modest distance away from the gravity brane, and gravity will be incredibly weak.

Black holes can bang against space-time as mallets on a drum and have a very characteristic song.

Playgrounds are essentially machines to induce Newtonian physics on our own bodies.

Another mode of accumulating power arises from lifting a weight and then allowing it to fall.

What we were seeing was a little bit like throwing the apple up in the air and seeing it blast off into space.

Our annual school physics trip was always to Blackpool Pleasure Beach, as it's such a good example of Newtonian physics. You can learn about centrifugal force and Newton's first law from the roller coasters, and the Viking long boat is a giant pendulum. It's good for children to understand that science underpins all these brilliant things.

We're used to thinking of force as a stable phenomenon, but it has a cinematic variable, which is acceleration.

You throw a rock in the water, and ripples spread out slowly. But they do go far.

No lens is quick enough to track the movement of the human body. The molecules are always moving.

We know about black holes and neutron stars, but we hope there are other phenomena we can see because of the gravitational waves they emit.

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.

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.

The size of the effect that we measured from the first event, the merging of two black holes, the actual size of the signal was about one thousandth the size of a proton, what it did to our apparatus.

Breaks like a ball falling off a pool table.