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?