Rainer Weiss

Observing gravitational waves would yield an enormous amount of information about the phenomena of strong-field gravity. If we could detect black holes collide, that would be amazing.

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.

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.

The concept of what we're looking for is so important. The fact that the effect is tiny is just our misfortune.

I wasn't unpopular. I didn't have any trouble getting girls.

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.

All at once, funding was gone due to the Mansfield Amendment, which was a reaction to the Vietnam War. In the minds of the local RLE administrators, research in gravitation and cosmology was not in the military's interest, and support was given to solid-state physics, which was deemed more relevant.

Over years, the noise level will be brought down, and LIGO will be three times better and see three times farther.

The waves from all the different parts of a sphere would cancel each other out. You need motion that's nonspherical.

We've seen black holes, which is already wonderful. We also expect to see the merger of neutron stars, and that was a thing that actually gave this field a certain credibility when it was discovered that there were pairs of neutron stars in our galaxy, and people stopped laughing at us when that was found out.

My parents were singularly uninterested in me. My father was too self-centered and too busy with his own practice to pay a lot of attention to me, and my mother was probably deflected more by my sister.

People say, 'I failed out of college! My life is over!' Well, it's not over. It depends on what you do with it.