Nobel physicist key to world’s 1st gravitational wave discovery in Eastern WA dies

The renowned experimental physicist and Nobel laureate whose brainchild resulted in the LIGO observatory at Hanford in Eastern Washington has died.

Rainer Weiss, 92, died Aug. 25 in Massachusetts, according to MIT News. Weiss was a Massacusetts Institute of Technology professor emeritus.

Weiss was born in Berlin in 1932, but his family fled Nazi Germany to Prague, Czechoslovakia, and the emigrated to New York City, where he grew up.

He came up with the idea for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, which resulted in twin observatories being built on unused land at the Hanford nuclear site near Richland and in Livingston, La., according to MIT News.

Then Gov. Jay Inslee, right, recognizes Nobel laureate Rainer Weiss as “Washingtonian of the Day” during the grand opening of the LIGO Exploration Center near Richland June 2, 2022. The 5,000-square-foot center features interactive exhibits to explain science concepts related to LIGO.

The LIGO observatories confirmed Einstein’s theory of general relativity when they made the first ever physical detection of gravitational waves, or ripples in space and time, Sept. 14, 2015, launching a new era in astrophysics.

Since then the Hanford and Louisiana observatories have worked together to make about 300 detections of ripples in space and time, or gravitational waves, passing through the Earth from cataclysmic events in space. The information helps researchers better understand the forces that shaped the universe, possibly rewriting our understanding of physics.

Weiss shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for LIGO in 2017 with two other scientists for their contributions to LIGO’s two detectors and the observation of gravitational waves.

When he was awarded the Nobel Prize he told MIT News that the concept for the LIGO observatory was a result of an MIT class exercise five decades ago.

“What’s the simplest thing I can think of to show these students that you could detect the influence of a gravitational wave?” he said he wondered then.

That became the basic idea for LIGO, with Weiss a leader of the team that built the observatories at Hanford and in Louisiana, with funding from the National Science Foundation, according to MIT News.

The two LIGO observatories, now aided by similar observatories in Italy and Japan, confirm the detections of gravitational waves by measuring the minute stretching and squeezing of Earth caused by gravity waves on scales 10 thousand trillion times smaller than a human hair.

LIGO Hanford has two vacuum tubes that extend 2.5 miles across the shrub-steppe landscape near Richland.

At LIGO Hanford vacuum tubes extend for 2.5 miles at right angles across previously unused Hanford site shrub steppe land near the Tri-Cities.

A high power laser beam is split to go down each tube, bouncing off the mirrors at each end.

If the beam is undisturbed, it will bounce back and recombine perfectly. But if a gravity wave is pulsing through the Earth, making one of the tubes slightly longer and the other slightly shorter, the beam will not recombine as expected.

Weiss was back at Hanford LIGO in June 2022 to celebrate the grand opening of the LIGO Exploration Center or LExC, at the observatory, with then Gov. Jay Inslee. Weiss’ Nobel Prize medal is displayed at the center, which has interactive exhibits for children and adults that explain the principles of physics used to detect gravitational waves.

Artist’s rendition of the merger of two neutron stars.

Inslee named Weiss “Washingtonian of the Day” in June 2022.

Life is more interesting if you have a deeper understanding of the world around you and “how science does its tricks,” Weiss said at the center’s opening.

The LIGO Exploration Center is open 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday. From Richland take Highway 240 northwest and then drive north on Route 10 for about five miles.