Rainer Weiss

Origins and early life

Rainer Weiss was born in Berlin on 29 September 1932, the son of Frederick Weiss, a neurologist who later became a psychoanalyst, and of Gertrude Loesner, an actress.

Work and career

In his Nobel autobiography he writes that his father came from a well-off German Jewish family in Berlin and his mother from a Protestant family of civil servants and lawyers near Koblenz. His father was forced out of Germany by the Nazis and the family joined him in Prague; after the Munich agreement of September 1938 they sought visas for any country that would take Jews, and reached New York in January 1939, helped by the Stix family of Saint Louis.

A scholarship from a refugee relief organization linked to a neighbourhood church took him to the Columbia Grammar School, and as a teenager he earned money repairing radios. He entered MIT in 1950, dropped out, became a technician in Jerrold Zacharias's laboratory in 1953, and with his help took his bachelor's degree in 1955 and his doctorate in 1962. After Tufts and Princeton, he joined the MIT faculty in 1964, measured the spectrum of the cosmic microwave background from balloons and chaired the science working group of the COBE satellite.

In 1972 he set out how a laser interferometer could detect gravitational waves, with arms that would have to be kilometres long, the design behind LIGO, which he founded with Kip Thorne and Ronald Drever. On 14 September 2015 LIGO recorded for the first time the gravitational waves Einstein had predicted, sent out by two black holes that had collided 1.3 billion years earlier.

Recognition

In 2017 he received one half of the Nobel Prize in Physics for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves, the other half going to Barry Barish and Kip Thorne. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 25 August 2025, at the age of ninety-two, survived by his wife Rebecca and their two children.