Rainer Weiss Quotes

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

And it really began with Einstein. We attended his lectures. Now the theory of relativity remained - and still remains - only a theory. It has not been proven. But it suggested a completely different picture of the physical world.

I had a difficult time getting my arms around Einstein's work, even when I was a physics major at one of the top universities in India.

The real reason why general relativity is widely accepted is because it made predictions that were borne out by experimental observations.

Since Einstein developed his theory of relativity, and Rutherford and Bohr revolutionised physics, our picture of the world has radically changed.

There was a long history of speculation that in quantum gravity, unlike Einstein's classical theory, it might be possible for the topology of spacetime to change.

By the time 1967 had rolled around, general relativity had been relegated to mathematics departments... in most people's minds, it bore no relation to physics. And that was mostly because experiments to prove it were so hard to do - all these effects that Einstein's theory had predicted were infinitesimally small.

Experimentally, we now have demonstrated that Einstein's theory is right in strong gravitational fields. That's important to a lot of people.

Einstein's theory of relativity does a fantastic job for explaining big things. Quantum mechanics is fantastic for the other end of the spectrum - for small things.

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.

Einstein's gravitational theory, which is said to be the greatest single achievement of theoretical physics, resulted in beautiful relations connecting gravitational phenomena with the geometry of space; this was an exciting idea.

When you look at the calculation, it's amazing that every time you try to prove or disprove time travel, you've pushed Einstein's theory to the very limits where quantum effects must dominate. That's telling us that you really need a theory of everything to resolve this question. And the only candidate is string theory.

One of the most exciting things about dark energy is that it seems to live at the very nexus of two of our most successful theories of physics: quantum mechanics, which explains the physics of the small, and Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, which explains the physics of the large, including gravity.

Einstein explained his theory to me every day, and on my arrival I was fully convinced that he understood it.

Einstein had looked at the numbers and dimensions that went into his equations for gravitational waves and said, essentially, 'This is so tiny that it will never have any influence on anything, and nobody can measure it.' And when you think about the times and the technology in 1916, he was probably right.

For reasons probably related to the popular vision of Albert Einstein and, also, the threat posed by black holes in comic books and science fiction, our gravitational wave discoveries have had an amazing public impact.

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.

Pulsars are in an ideal part of the universe to test Einstein's theory of relativity - so far, it's holding up well. They may even one day act as navigational beacons for spacecraft. I'll never tire of them; they really are the most extraordinary objects.

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.

I arrived at Princeton as a graduate student from the University of Manitoba in 1958. To my great good fortune, I fell into work with Bob Dicke, a truly great physicist who decided a few years before that that gravity is too important to ignore, as it had been in recent years in physics.

Einstein had two new predictions from general relativity. One was that light would bend. That was tested in 1919, and basically, he was proven right. The second prediction was gravitational waves, which took us 100 years to prove. The theory itself, which is thought by most to be rather obscure, you use every day, probably.

String theory's biggest prediction is that gravity exists. That's good. That's a lot more than preceding theories could do.

Every string theory that's been written down says the speed of light is universal. But other ideas about quantum gravity predict the speed of light has actually increased.

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?

They say Einstein died while he was still trying to figure out gravity. I think I'm going to die still trying to figure out some of the things about Blink.