LIGO and the Detection of Gravitational Waves

OCT 01, 1999

Large detectors on opposite sides of the country are about to start monitoring the cosmos for the gravitational waves that general relativity tells us should be emanating from catastrophic astrophysical events.

DOI: 10.1063/1.882861

Barry C. Barish

Rainer Weiss

The idea of gravitational waves was already implicit in the 1905 special theory of relativity, with its finite limiting speed for information transfer. The explicit formulation for gravitational waves in general relativity was put forward by Einstein in 1916 and 1918. He showed that the acceleration of masses generates time‐dependent gravitational fields that propagate away from their sources at the speed of light as warpages of spacetime. Such a propagating warpage is called a gravitational wave.

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References

1. A. Einstein. Reports of the Physical‐Mathematical Session of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences (1916), p. 688.
2. A. Einstein, Reports of the Physical‐Mathematical Session of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences (1918), p. 154.
3. R. A. Hulse, J. H. Taylor, Astrophys. J. 195, L51 (1975).https://doi.org/ASJOAB
4. K. S. Thorne, in 300 Years of Gravitation, S. Hawking, W. Israel, eds., Cambridge U. P., Cambridge, England (1987), chap. 9.
5. P. R. Saulson, Fundamentals of Interferometric Gravitational Wave Detectors, World Scientific, Singapore (1994).

More about the Authors

Barry C. Barish. California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Rainer Weiss. Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.