Hong Kong Shaw Prize winner who got into gravitational waves by chance

Physicist Rainer Weiss was asked to teach general relativity at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and felt he was just one day ahead of his students

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Rainer Weiss (left) and Kip Thorne won the Shaw Prize for Astronomy along with Ronald Drever. Photo: Edward Wong

Published: 7:00pm, 28 Sep 2016Updated: 11:40am, 29 Sep 2016

Physicist Rainer Weiss was never much of an expert on general relativity. He describes himself as more of an experimenter – “a plumber” and a maker of things.

For 30 years, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) physics department did not offer a course in general relativity. But that changed in 1967 when Weiss took the helm.

“They asked me to teach this course and I couldn’t tell them I couldn’t understand general relativity. I was one day ahead of the students at best and most of the good students might have been ahead of me,” Weiss, 84, joked.

Weiss – one of three winners of this year’s prestigious Shaw Prize in Astronomy – co-founded the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).

In September 2015, after 30 years of work and over US$1 billion in investment, LIGO finally achieved what it was set out to find: a direct detection of cosmic gravitational waves as predicted by Albert Einstein in his General Theory of Relativity 100 years ago. The waves were generated by two colliding black holes a billion lightyears away.

Hong Kong Shaw Prize winner who got into gravitational waves by chance

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Physicist Rainer Weiss was asked to teach general relativity at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and felt he was just one day ahead of his students

Physicist Rainer Weiss was asked to teach general relativity at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and felt he was just one day ahead of his students