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, rainer weiss biography.

Writing this at 73 and having shed the august responsibilities of a full fledged faculty, it is natural to be retrospective rather than to look at prospects. Currently working on the LIGO project, a joint Caltech and MIT effort, to observe gravitational waves and use them to study gravitation and astrophysics. My role now is to be the equivalent of a grad student. Very much enjoy this. Over the years have worked on cosmological studies with Robert Dicke and David Wilkinson at Princeton. If you are really interested, you can read the standard stuff. Previously Dr.

Rainer weiss biography

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. After the end of WW II, with the ready availability of surplus electronics components I began to construct and service radios, ultimately designing, constructing and selling hi-fidelity music systems to people interested in classical music. After a life-changing love affair which started me on learning the piano, I lost the girl and flunked out of MIT in I worked with Zacharias to develop a new clock based on an atomic fountain with the intent of significantly greater precision to enable a terrestrial test of the Einstein Red Shift. In , with our new daughter Sarah, we moved to Princeton for me to be a Post-Doctoral scientist with Robert Dicke who was bringing research in gravitation and General Relativity back from mathematics into physics. The experiment I did was to search for scalar gravitational waves with a gravimeter to detect excitation of the monopole vibrational mode of the Earth at a In I returned to MIT on the Physics faculty and started a new group dedicated to Cosmology and Gravitation, working initially on the absolute frequency stabilization of lasers and a laser interferometer experiment to establish a limit on a tired photon hypothesis for the cosmological red shift. The interferometer operated at the quantum limit. In I was asked to teach a General Relativity course.

Rai decided to establish a fellowship in the Physics Department and to name it the Barish—Weiss Rainer weiss biography. Eventually, we did get funded and the MIT prototype was completed as well.

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 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 Weiss brought two fields of fundamental physics research from birth to maturity: characterization of the cosmic background radiation, [3] and interferometric gravitational wave observation. In he made pioneering measurements of the spectrum of the cosmic microwave background radiation, taken from a weather balloon , showing that the microwave background exhibited the thermal spectrum characteristic of the remnant radiation from the Big Bang.

Rainer weiss biography

After serving as an assistant professor of physics at Tufts University and then a research associate at Princeton University, he returned to MIT and has been there ever since. Weiss has contributed to a variety of scientific fields, including atomic physics, laser physics and astronomy. He co-founded LIGO with Thorne and later Drever, having laid the foundations for the project in with a paper detailing how an interferometer could distinguish gravitational waves from background noise. He has continued to contribute to nearly all elements of the experiment since then. National Academy of Sciences.

Ppi pixel density calculator

Authority control. Drever's representative, Rainer Weiss and Kip S. His result was remarkable: with arms several kilometres long, it would be possible to measure changes in distance as tiny as 10 —18 m — barely one thousandth of the size of a proton — as a passing gravitational wave stresses space to cause a strain of 10 — However, at a significantly increased investment in the field by the NSF. World Scientific. I simply did not know enough mathematics and real electrical engineering to make headway. Rai attended MIT because of his strong interest in electrical engineering. 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. But when the Munich Agreement allowed German troops to enter Czechoslovakia, the family had to escape once more. Back to Astronomy Weiss was raised in New York City, where he initially attended public school. As a faculty member, he would see MIT losing some of the best graduate student applicants to other universities that had the capability of offering graduate student fellowships. Archived from the original PDF on October 13, Langer , Richard P. Because the relativistic effects are usually small, the research tends toward the development of techniques to measure small quantities with precision and to understand the limitations in the measurements.

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.

The basis of the clock was to gain a long observing time in a vertical atom fountain. Rabi and J. In this I have been influenced by the work of Robert Dicke in the early s. Retrieved Archived from the original PDF on Rai is happy that he had the opportunity to give back to MIT. Retrieved 3 October Bibcode : CQGra.. MIT News. The problem was the surface noise on the records, especially, in piano pieces. So, Rai came back and started a research group in cosmology and gravitation. These are binary mergers of black holes, or neutron stars, or a black hole and a neutron star. The long distance love affair lasted for part of the fall and winter, but seemed to be falling apart in the late winter and spring. This short article about a person from the United States can be made longer.