Rainer Weiss Quotes

It now appears that the way the universe began can indeed be determined, using imaginary time.

To understand the universe in the state that it began in, the so-called Big Bang, we need laws of physics that work better than our current set of rules and procedures, which break down when we try to push them back to the beginning.

I have always believed that astrophysics should be the extrapolation of laboratory physics, that we must begin from the present universe and work our way backward to progressively more remote and uncertain epochs.

For years, my early work with Roger Penrose seemed to be a disaster for science. It showed that the universe must have begun with a singularity, if Einstein's general theory of relativity is correct. That appeared to indicate that science could not predict how the universe would begin.

Most gravity has no known origin. Is it some exotic particle? Nobody knows. Is dark energy responsible for expansion of the universe? Nobody knows.

We're going to be seeing things from regions in the universe where Einstein is the whole story. Newton you can forget about.

Physics grapples with the largest questions the universe presents. 'Where did the totality of reality come from?' 'Did time have a beginning?'

Cosmology is a rapidly advancing field.

Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.

We are the product of quantum fluctuations in the very early universe.

There is nothing bigger or older than the universe.

General relativity is the cornerstone of cosmology and astrophysics. It has also provided the conceptual basis for string theory and other attempts to unify all the forces of nature in terms of geometrical structures.

The Planck satellite may detect the imprint of the gravitational waves predicted by inflation. This would be quantum gravity written across the sky.

Science sent the Hubble telescope out into space, so it could capture light and the absence thereof, from the very beginning of time. And the telescope really did that. So now we know that there was once absolutely nothing, such a perfect nothing that there wasn't even nothing or once.

We'll have four different gravitational wave windows open within the next 20 years, and each of them will see something different. We'll be probing the birth of the universe with this. The so-called 'inflationary era' of the universe. We'll be probing the birth of the fundamental forces and how they came into being.

The geometry, the content, and the fate of the universe are all intricately linked. If you know two, you can deduce the third.

I feel that I've often pointed out that there are countless aspects of life and nature that scientists and scientific thinkers cannot explain. Why the universe is accelerating in its expansion and what came before the Big Bang serve as compelling examples. The process of science provides a way to seek answers to those questions.

And what we know, or think we know, about the universe of space and time is changing very quickly.

I like science fiction and physics, things like that. Planets being sucked into black holes, and the various vortexes that create possibility, and what happens on the other side of the black hole. To me it's the microcosmic study of the macrocosmic universe in man, and that's why I'm attracted to it.

My main interest is the problem of the singularity. If we can't understand what happened at the singularity we came out of, then we don't seem to have any understanding of the laws of particle physics. I'd be very happy just to understand the last singularity and leave the other ones to future generations.

First of all, the Big Bang wasn't very big. Second of all, there was no bang. Third, Big Bang Theory doesn't tell you what banged, when it banged, how it banged. It just said it did bang. So the Big Bang theory in some sense is a total misnomer.

You have to say now that space is something. Space can vibrate, space can fluctuate, space can be quantum mechanical, but what the devil is it?

Evolutionary cosmology formulates theories in which a universe is capable of giving rise to and generating future universes out of itself, within black holes or whatever.

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is one of 50 or 100 billion other galaxies in the universe. And with every step, every window that modern astrophysics has opened to our mind, the person who wants to feel like they're the center of everything ends up shrinking.

People have contemplated the origin and evolution of the universe since before the time of Aristotle. Very recently, the era of speculation has given way to a time of science.