LIGO Laboratory mourns the passing of Prof. Rainer Weiss of MIT, one of the founders of LIGO

LIGO is profoundly saddened to share news of the loss of our long-time friend, colleague, and champion, Dr. Rainer Weiss, who passed away on August 25th, a few weeks before his 93rd birthday. While we cannot begin to express how great a loss this is for LIGO and the global gravitational-wave community, below we reproduce some accolades enthusiastically paid to Rai after it was announced that he (along with Kip Thorne and Barry Barish) were awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics. These tributes are as relevant today as they were then, clearly illustrating the enormous role Rai played in LIGO's realization and ultimate success.

The LIGO Lab community will greatly miss our friend and colleague, whose immeasurable impact on gravitational wave astronomy and dozens of students and scientists around the world will be felt for generations to come: 

“Rai made [LIGO] happen, person by person and idea by idea. He really worked to enable individuals to help in the adventure, and no problem was too small to get his complete attention if it was in the way of success. Between the human legacy of a generation of scientists and engineers, and the scientific legacy of this step forward in physics, Rai earned this prize.” --David Shoemaker (MIT), leader of the Advanced LIGO Project

“I began working for Rai in late '86, before the thing called LIGO was formed, but after he and the early team had been working on GW detection for more than a decade. As a hardware guy, I found working for him and the rest of the amazing instrumentalists in his ‘Gravitation and Cosmology Research Group’ at MIT to be a great pleasure. People who worked there were generous with advice and help for newcomers, largely because of Rai's generosity with ideas and help to them.” --LIGO Livingston Head, Joe Giaime

“It is not an exaggeration to say that the field of gravitational wave detection would not be what it is today without Rai. Most people recognize that he was the first person to envision a large detector and to identify (almost) all of the problems that would need to be overcome. What is less widely recognized is the large number of current leaders in the field who developed their skills working with Rai as a student or postdoc. Rai had an uncanny ability to draw the best out of each student, and to impart his particular style of approaching problems.  The resulting core LSC leadership is one of the most important parts of his legacy." -Stan Whitcomb, LIGO Laboratory Chief Scientist (ret.)

“I suspect that, for Rai, no recognition could compare to the excitement and gratification engendered by the actual detection. He has been in this game since before the beginning and is still in it. Few of us are fortunate enough to see our impossible dream become reality.” --Beverly Berger

Weiss's home institution, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has written a wonderful article about Rai, which we link to, below and encourage all to read:

Professor Emeritus Rainer Weiss, influential physicist who forged new paths to understanding the universe, dies at 92