Rainer Weiss Quotes

Bodies like the earth are not made to move on curved orbits by a force called gravity; instead, they follow the nearest thing to a straight path in a curved space, which is called a geodesic. A geodesic is the shortest (or longest) path between two nearby points.

In some sense, gravity does not exist; what moves the planets and the stars is the distortion of space and time.

From a theoretical point of view, it is very hard to imagine how gravity could avoid being quantized.

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.

You know the Einstein waves can be thought of as a distortion of space and time. But the way we see it, we see it as a distortion of space. And space is enormously stiff. You can't squish it; you can't change its dimensions so easily.

When forced to summarize the general theory of relativity in one sentence: Time and space and gravitation have no separate existence from matter.

In curved Einsteinian space we are at all times, technically, looking at the back of our own head.

Any two particles in the universe attract each other through the gravitational interaction.

An event horizon, or the point of no return, is only a byproduct of the bending of space. However, electricity and magnetism, by themselves, have no event horizon. It gets complicated, however, if a black hole has charge, and then this new solution does have an event horizon.

Gravity is matter’s sugar daddy.

A big misconception is that a black hole is made of matter that has just been compacted to a very small size. That's not true. A black hole is made from warped space and time.

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

Black holes are very exotic objects. Technically, a black hole puts a huge amount of mass inside of zero volume. So our understanding of the center of black holes doesn't make sense, which is a big clue to physicists that we don't have our physics quite right.

Dark energy is incredibly strange, but actually it makes sense to me that it went unnoticed, because dark energy has no effect on daily life, or even inside our solar system.

We know there is gravity because apples fall from trees. We can observe gravity in daily life. If we could throw an apple to the edge of the universe, we would observe it accelerating.

… theoretical physics is actual philosophy. It has revolutionized fundamental concepts, e.g., about space and time (relativity), about causality (quantum theory), and about substance and matter (atomistics), and it has taught us new methods of thinking (complementarity) which are applicable far beyond physics.

If space is a fabric, then of course fabrics can have ripples, which we have now seen directly. But fabrics can also rip. Then the question is what happens when the fabric of space and time is ripped by a black hole?

What really made me think about space and begin to think about ways to use it was Einstein's statement that there are no fixed points in space. Everything in the universe is moving all the time.

My passion is to understand the non-linear dynamics of warped space-time, and the ideal venue for this is black-hole collisions.

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.

There is still some gravity where we are and even as far out as our moon. That is why our moon stays in orbit around the Earth. We don't feel the gravity up here because it is so much smaller than the force we feel when we are on the Earth.

The fact that people can predict gravity wave sources that are within shouting distance makes me feel incredibly confident. Compared to monopoles, these sources are not just optimistic thinking.

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

I am deeply impressed with the way dark matter has explained cosmological observations.

We cannot explain the phenomenon of gravitational lensing without general relativity, and this is where MOND spectacularly fails.