Rainer weiss biography

Primary areas of research: Atomic clocks, Cosmic background radiation measurements, Gravitational wave detection.

I was born in Berlin, Germany on September 29, My father was a neurologist who had rebelled against his family of well-off intellectual German jews with connections to the Rathenau family. He had become an idealistic communist. My mother was a Protestant who had rebelled against her family by becoming an actress. In the family emigrated to Prague, Czechoslovakia to escape the Nazis. In my sister Sybille was born.

Rainer weiss biography

More About Rainer Weiss. I was born in Berlin, Germany on September 29, My father was a neurologist who had rebelled against his family of well off intellectual German jews with connections to the Rathenau family. He had become an idealistic communist. My mother was a Christian who had rebelled against her family by becoming an actress. Berlin in was balkanized with no strong central government. Different parts of the city were Nazi, Communist and Weimar Republic controlled. After giving testimony about a botched operation by a Nazi doctor, my father was assaulted and held captive in one of the Nazi districts. My mother with help of her still politically connected family managed to get him released. He emigrated to Prague, Czechoslovakia, and after I was born my mother joined him there. Lucky to get visa In they had another child, Sybille. In September of the family took a vacation to the Tatra mountains in Slovakia. In a hotel filled with expatriate German jews we all gathered around a gothic looking wooden radio and heard Neville Chamberlain give Czechoslovakia to Hitler to avoid a second world war. The hotel emptied in hours with people rushing to the consulates in Prague with the hope of leaving before the Nazis took over.

But his efforts failed and he decided to go to college to learn enough to enable him to solve the problem.

His father was a physician and his mother was an actress. His family was forced out of Germany by the Nazis since his father was Jewish and a Communist. Rai, his mother and father fled to Prague, Czechoslovakia. In a sister was born in Prague. In , after Chamberlain appeased Hitler by effectively giving him Czechoslovakia, the family was able to obtain visas to enter the United States through the Stix Family in St.

He is best known for inventing the laser interferometric technique which is the basic operation of LIGO. Weiss has helped realize a number of challenging experimental tests of fundamental physics. He is a member of the Fermilab Holometer experiment, which uses a 40m laser interferometer to measure properties of space and time at quantum scale and provide Planck-precision tests of quantum holographic fluctuation. His mother, an actress, was Christian. The family fled first to Prague , but Germany's occupation of Czechoslovakia after the Munich Agreement caused them to flee again; the philanthropic Stix family of St. Louis helped them obtain visas to enter the United States. He studied at MIT , dropped out during his junior year, [14] but eventually returned to receive his S. He taught at Tufts University from to , was a postdoctoral scholar at Princeton University from to , and then joined the faculty at MIT in

Rainer weiss biography

The Nobel Prize in Physics goes back 1. Gravitational waves were predicted by Albert Einstein in The waves transport energy at the speed of light and are created when a mass accelerates. As the black holes rotated around each other, they accelerated just as water does as it circles a drain. He spent several years as a post doctoral scientist with Robert Dicke at Princeton to search for scalar gravitational waves using the Earth as the sensor. In , he started a research program as an MIT faculty member. There were several directions in the programme: an attempt to determine if G the Newtonian gravitational constant was varying with time — requiring stabilised lasers and precision mechanical instruments to measure Earth g, measurements of the spectrum and isotropy of the recently discovered Cosmic Microwave Background CMB radiation and a third programme to develop an interferometric gravitational wave detector. The work on interferometric gravitational wave detectors came from describing a gedanken experiment at MIT to detect gravitational waves using free masses floating in space and measuring the time it takes light to travel between them. A gravitational wave will cause the time to vary. Weiss discovered that if scaled to multi kilometer sizes, such a free mass detector with laser sources could actually have enough sensitivity to detect astrophysical gravitational wave sources.

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I continue to play similar roles in Advanced LIGO, but now there are many more skilled people more knowledgeable than I in the project. Physics Laser physics Experimental gravitation Cosmic background measurements. I asked Kip Thorne to present his ideas to the committee. Rai invited some family friends to listen to these concerts on his equipment. I was born in Berlin, Germany on September 29, But his efforts failed and he decided to go to college to learn enough to enable him to solve the problem. Nobel Prize-winning American physicist. When younger I hiked and swam. In I went back to the gedanken experiment to see if it could be converted into a real experiment. The waves will offer a "look" at the strong field gravitation in the vicinity of black holes and possibly the earliest moments of the Universe. But that did not immediately work out either. The science of the gravitational wave sources and data analysis techniques were also presented in a week of fact finding. His family was forced out of Germany by the Nazis since his father was Jewish and a Communist. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He is best known for inventing the laser interferometric technique which is the basic operation of LIGO.

New York Philharmonic I started making money by fixing radios. Davis and Galen D. Once Rainer was born, Gertrude travelled with her new baby to join Frederick in Czechoslovakia, where the couple had another child, Sybille, in They were blown away, they thought they were at Carnegie Hall. Read next Environment and energy Feature Home, green home: scientific solutions for cutting carbon and maybe saving money. I finally did my PhD thesis on the hyperfine structure and electric dipole moment of the rotation states of the uninteresting Hydrogen Flouride molecule. Cosmology and gravitation I left to take a faculty position at MIT in the fall of By the end of the sophomore year, I decided to major in physics as the course structure was less rigid. The students did this as a homework problem with mathematics not more difficult than that used in Special Relativity with a time varying metric. Kip had not realized their potential. He was so grateful for what Jerrold Zacharias had done for him that in many ways this gift is a tribute to him. Please enter the e-mail address you used to register to reset your password Enter e-mail address.