Rainer Weiss (Physics Nobel 2017) Age, Biography, Wife, Family & More

Rainer Weiss (Physics Nobel 2017) Age, Biography, Wife, Family & More

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Bio
Real Name Rainer Weiss
Nickname Rai
Profession Physicist
Physical Stats & More
Height (approx.) in centimeters**- 173 cm**
in meters**- 1.73 m**
in feet inches**- 5’ 8”**
Weight (approx.) in kilograms**- 75 kg**
in pounds**- 165 lbs**
Eye Color Dark Brown
Hair Color White (Semi-bald)
Personal Life
Date of Birth 29 September 1932
Age (as in 2017) 85 Years
Birth Place Berlin, Germany
Zodiac sign/Sun sign Libra
Nationality American
Hometown New York City, USA
School Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School, New York City
College Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Educational Qualifications B.S.
Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Scholar
Family Not Known
Religion Judaism
Hobbies Listening to classical music, playing piano, swimming, hiking
Favorite Things
Favorite Musicians Mozart, Beethoven, Franz Schubert
Girls, Affairs and More
Marital Status Married
Wife/Spouse Rebecca Young (Retired Librarian - m. 1959 - present)
Marriage Date Year 1959
Children Son- Benjamin (Art Historian)
Daughter- Sarah Weiss (Ethnomusicologist)

Some Lesser Known Facts About Rainer Weiss

  • Rainer was born into a Jewish family and spent early years of his life in escaping from the Nazi rule.

  • Hilter’s fear forced his family to move to Prague in late 1932, and to the United States in 1938.

  • He received a scholarship to the Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School.

  • After graduating from high school in 1950, he developed an interest in electricity and electronics.

  • Later, he chose major in physics as he found it easier.

  • In 1953, he started working in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) at MIT.

  • During his initial research days, he walked into the atomic beam laboratory of American Physicist Jerrold R. Zacharias, and started doing carpentry over there. After making a dry ice chest, he started working on the electronics of an atomic clock, a new idea using the hyperfine transition in atomic cesium as observed in the pristine conditions of an atomic beam. Rainer and Zacharias together worked on an improved atomic clock that was intended to be precise enough to measure the Einstein gravitational redshift between a clock placed in a valley and another on the top of a neighboring mountain, an altitude difference of approx. 3km. 

  • In 1964, he started working at MIT as a faculty.

  • In the mid-1960s, he formed a new research group in RLE at MIT to research in cosmology and gravitation.

  • In 1975, he was appointed the chairperson of a committee for NASA to look at the role the space program in
    cosmology and gravitation.

  • During the feasibility study with industry to design and construct a long baseline interferometric detector system with sufficient sensitivity, Rainer, and Kip Thorne came up with the idea that Caltech and MIT should do the LIGO project together. In 1983, Kip, Ronald Drever, and Rainer jointly presented the result of the study to an NSF committee reviewing large physics projects.

  • In 2006, with John C. Mather, he and the COBE team received the Gruber Prize in Cosmology.

  • In 2007, with Ronald Drever, he was awarded the Einstein Prize.

  • Rainer Weiss, along with fellow scientists Barry C. Barish and Kip Thorne , was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for “decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves”. While Weiss takes away one-half of the total prize money (ÂŁ825,000), Barish and Thorne will share half of the remaining prize.

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