Zitat des Tages von Rainer Weiss:
We're going to be seeing things from regions in the universe where Einstein is the whole story. Newton you can forget about.
We knew about black holes in other ways, and we knew about neutron stars - well, those are the two things that ultimately got seen.
Over years, the noise level will be brought down, and LIGO will be three times better and see three times farther.
The triumph is that the waveform we measure is very well represented by solutions of these equations. Einstein is right in a regime where his theory has never been tested before.
Most of us fully expect that we're going to learn things we didn't know about.
Experimentally, we now have demonstrated that Einstein's theory is right in strong gravitational fields. That's important to a lot of people.
One of the things I sort of dreamt about awhile ago is that if Einstein were still alive, it would be absolutely wonderful to go to him and tell him about the discovery, and he would have been very pleased, I'm sure of that.
Why do you do science? In this particular case, we don't have a very good reason to be doing this except for the knowledge that it brings. This research is especially important to young people. We all want to know what's going on in the universe.
We are all enormously indebted to the National Science Foundation of the United States and the American public for steady support over close to 50 years.
I thought that there must be an easier way to explain how a gravitational wave interacts with matter: If one just looked at the most primitive thing of all, 3D floating masses out in space, and look at how the space between them changed because of the gravitational wave coming between them.
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.
A gravitational wave is a very slight stretching in one dimension. If there's a gravitational wave traveling towards you, you get a stretch in the dimension that's perpendicular to the direction it's moving. And then perpendicular to that first stretch, you have a compression along the other dimension.
There was a person who thought I was OK. I wasn't a complete dope. I got some confidence out of that.
This is the first real evidence that we've seen now of high gravitational field strengths: monstrous things like stars moving at the velocity of light, smashing into each other, and making the geometry of space-time turn into some sort of washing machine.
Every time you accelerate - say by jumping up and down - you're generating gravitational waves.
The waves travel with the velocity of light and slightly squeeze and stretch space transverse to the direction of their motion. The first waves we measured came from the collision of two black holes each about 30 times the mass of our sun.
I wasn't unpopular. I didn't have any trouble getting girls.
The field equations and the whole history of general relativity have been complicated.
People say, 'I failed out of college! My life is over!' Well, it's not over. It depends on what you do with it.
The rule has been that when one opens a new channel to the universe, there is usually a surprise in it. Why should the gravitational channel be deprived of this?
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.
It's very, very exciting that it worked out in the end that we are actually detecting things and actually adding to the knowledge, through gravitational waves, of what goes on in the universe.
We were looking almost one-tenth of the way to the edge of the universe. We're planning to use the facilities we have to make improvements by another factor of 10... a strain sensitivity that is 10 times smaller. This means looking 10 times further out into the universe.
We expect surprises. There has to be surprises.
Many of us on the project were thinking if we ever saw a gravitational wave, it'd be an itsy bitsy little tiny thing; we'd never see it. This thing was so big that you didn't have to do much to see it.
All of this technology wasn't available to Einstein. I bet he would've invented LIGO.