Rainer Weiss Quotes

People think of waves as going in an orderly crash - whoosh - crash - whoosh, but in fact there are lots of different crashes and whooshes, all at different stages, and all going off at the same time.

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.

Notwithstanding these major arguments the wave theory initially did not meet with complete acceptance.

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 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.

As to the effect of the wave on the air, we will suppose the water to be quite flat and the air motionless, a heavy undulation comes on the scene, it has to pass, so it pushes the air up with its face, letting it fall again as its back glides onwards.

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.

A wave is never found alone, but is mingled with as many other waves as there are uneven places in the object where the said wave is produced.

If you throw a stone in a pond... the waves which strike against the shores are thrown back towards the spot where the stone struck; and on meeting other waves they never intercept each other's course... In a small pond one and the same stroke gives birth to many motions of advance and recoil.

But it's Sunday, Mr. Bell. Clocks are slow on Sundays.

Waves from moving sources: Adagio. Andante. Allegro moderato.

Clock measurement is not time itself. In fact, so opposed are they that one could argue the clock is not a synonym, but the opposite of time.

A long sea implies an uniform and steady motion of long and extensive waves; on the contrary, a short sea is when they run irregularly, broken, and interrupted; so as frequently to burst over a vessel's side or quarter.

In the industrial age and in analog clocks, a minute is some portion of an hour which is some portion of a day. You know, in the digital age, a minute is just a number. It's just 3:23. It's almost this absolute duration that doesn't have a connection to where the sun is or where our day is.

Our civilisation has lost this bond between times, and tends to measure time with a yardstick, bit by bit, from one point to another.

I'm trying to understand how time works. And that's a huge question that has lots of different aspects to it.

Having designed and built several clocks during my career it suddenly occurred to me that when you look at the face of a clock both hands have the same center.

Time-space as commonly understood, in the sense of the distance measured between two time-points, is the result of time calculation.

Is time our invention, or is time a real thing... I realize we're measuring it, but in the cosmic scheme of things, is there really time?

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

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

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.

On New Year's Day every calendar, large and small, has the same number of dates. But we soon learn that the years are of very different lengths.

A watch worn by a particle of light would not tick at all. Light realizes the dreams of Ponce de Leon and the cosmetics industry: it doesn't age.

The wave is not the water. The water merely told us about the wave moving by.