Rainer Weiss Quotes

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.

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

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

Time can behave like another direction in space under extreme conditions.

Black holes are pretty scary when you ponder them. They seem nihilistic, infinitely destructive on an inconceivable scale, notwithstanding the ideas of Hawking radiation.

It's a pity that nobody has found an exploding black hole. If they had, I would have won a Nobel prize.

If you go down through the horizon of a black hole, at the center you don't find a tunnel that leads you to some other place in the universe.

Gravitational waves will bring us exquisitely accurate maps of black holes - maps of their space-time. Those maps will make it crystal clear whether or not what we're dealing with are black holes as described by general relativity.

My work on black holes was on the connection between black holes and elementary particles.

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.

Einstein got most of the things right about black holes. I'm not an expert, I must admit.

Wormholes are a gravitational phenomena. Or imaginary gravitational phenomena, as the case may be.

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.

Black holes, we all know, are these regions where if an object falls in, it can't get out, but the puzzle that many struggled with over the decades is, what happens to the information that an object contains when it falls into a black hole. Is it simply lost?

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.

There are no black holes in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity.

Fortunately, most things around the supermassive black hole are just going to go around it. They're going to orbit it. They don't actually get sucked in.

We have this interesting problem with black holes. What is a black hole? It is a region of space where you have mass that's confined to zero volume, which means that the density is infinitely large, which means we have no way of describing, really, what a black hole is!

The black holes of nature are the most perfect macroscopic objects there are in the universe: the only elements in their construction are our concepts of space and time.

I used to think information was destroyed in black hole. This was my biggest blunder, or at least my biggest blunder in science.

It's hard to know which stars in the sky will turn into black holes. And which ones will open up worm holes into entire new universes.

How do you observe something you can't see? This is the basic question of somebody who's interested in finding and studying black holes. Because black holes are objects whose pull of gravity is so intense that nothing can escape it, not even light, so you can't see it directly.

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.

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?

A lot of the things you see in science fiction revolve around black holes because black holes are strong enough to rip the fabric of space and time.