Rainer Weiss

Born on 29 September 1932 in Berlin, Rainer Weiss is an award-winning physicist who conceived of using laser interferometry to detect gravitational waves. Weiss immigrated with his family to New York in 1939 to escape Nazi persecution. With a gift for tinkering and an intense interest in electronics, Weiss enrolled in electrical engineering at MIT. He soon found that physics was a better fit, but he ended up dropping out during his junior year. Nevertheless, he found employment as a technician at MIT’s Building 20 under Jerrold Zacharias, who persuaded him to return to his studies. Weiss finished his bachelor’s degree in 1955 and went on to earn his PhD in 1962. After a postdoc at Princeton University working under Robert Dicke, Weiss returned to MIT as an assistant professor of physics in 1964. While preparing to teach a class on general relativity in 1967, he thought of detecting gravitational waves by measuring the travel time of light between freely floating masses. The resulting prototype was an L-shaped laser interferometer. In the ensuing decades Weiss would work with Kip Thorne and Ronald Drever to lead the development of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). By the 1970s Weiss had also become a leader launching weather balloons to study the newly discovered cosmic microwave background (CMB). In 1976 he joined the scientific working group for NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, which launched in 1989. Discoveries regarding the CMB’s thermal spectrum and its fluctuations netted two of the principals on the project, John Mather and George Smoot, the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics—which some physicists believe should have included Weiss. Now, since LIGO’s first direct detection of gravitational waves in September 2015, Weiss—currently professor of physics emeritus at MIT—may again be a contender for the Nobel. (Photo credit: Bryce Vickmark)

Update, 3 October 2017: Indeed he was a contender for the Nobel Prize. Weiss shared the 2017 physics prize with Thorne and former LIGO director Barry Barish.

Date in History: 29 September 1932