Rainer Weiss
Rainer Weiss · Science & Medicine
Decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves
1932, Berlin, Germany — 2025, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Germany · United States
Rainer Weiss is recognized among Jewish contributors to Science & Medicine — Decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves
Weiss was born in Berlin to a Jewish physician father and a Christian actress mother; because his father was Jewish, the family fled Nazi Germany, reaching the United States via Prague. At MIT he conceived the laser-interferometer design that became LIGO, and after decades of effort the instrument detected gravitational waves in 2015 — ripples in spacetime predicted by Einstein a century earlier. He shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics with Kip Thorne and Barry Barish.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: Jinfo.org / Nobel Prize Physics 2017
Decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves
Source: Jinfo.org / Nobel Prize Physics 2017
