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  • OK, I'm Rainer Weiss, W-E-I-S-S. I am emeritus professor

  • of physics at MIT.

  • What was your initial reaction when you first saw the signal

  • and you felt like--

  • Well, I was on vacation when I saw it, I was up in Maine.

  • And everybody has their own story about this, I'm sure.

  • But I was in Maine and my family was with me.

  • I mean, my wife and my son and his wife.

  • My daughter was not there, she was in Singapore.

  • And I woke up, I went to the computer as I do every morning.

  • I look at the log.

  • You know, we have logs that come from the sites,

  • I do that every morning.

  • And I noticed something funny.

  • They had canceled something that was going on--

  • you know, it always had--

  • these are days when you fix the apparatus.

  • They had canceled it.

  • I said, that's strange, what the hell

  • happened that made them cancel that?

  • So then all of a sudden, I got an email

  • from David Shoemaker, who you're going to be talking to.

  • He says, hey, there's something interesting that happened.

  • So I called MIT and I find out what it was.

  • That was my--

  • And then I said, holy mackerel.

  • And of course, I gave it all away, everybody knew it

  • who was around me.

  • I mean you can't keep that a secret from your wife

  • if she's sitting right there.

  • You know, and my son said, what the hell happened?

  • You know?

  • And suddenly, of course, everybody

  • had to be sworn to secrecy.

  • But OK.

  • And anyway, and then we followed it from there.

  • So that's how I found out about it.

  • But other people more dramatically were at the sites.

  • And nobody right way believed it.

  • Everybody thought it was a fluke.

  • It was too good.

  • And it took us a while to get to the point where all of us--

  • and that's why we've written this paper--

  • believe it.

  • OK?

  • How did you feel about it?

  • What was your reaction?

  • Well, my reaction was one of relief,

  • I'll be honest with you.

  • And I had this monkey on my back.

  • I mean, you know, having been involved

  • with starting this thing.

  • And somewhere deep inside of me, of all the criticism

  • that we have had and there are still plenty of criticisms.

  • People are saying, look, this theory that you're

  • dealing with is Einstein's theory,

  • there are better theories of gravity

  • that don't predict gravitational waves.

  • So you're wasting everybody's money.

  • You know, that kind of thing sort of gets

  • at you after a while, although you don't try to--

  • And so, this monkey was sort of gnawing

  • at me for probably some number of-- well, 20 years.

  • And he hopped off.

  • He's still walking around on the floor a little bit.

  • Because we're not yet at design.

  • I mean, we've got to get the design with Advanced LIGO.

  • I think then he'll vanish.

  • Congratulations.

  • It has nothing to do with me.

  • It's just that we did it.

  • Man has finally seen storm field gravity, for Pete's sake.

  • Amazing.

  • OK?

OK, I'm Rainer Weiss, W-E-I-S-S. I am emeritus professor

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