Joseph Weber (May 17, 1919 – September 30, 2000) was an American physicist. He gave the earliest public lecture on the principles behind the laser and the maser and developed the first gravitational wave detectors, known as .
Early life
Joseph Weber was born in Paterson, New Jersey, on 17 May 1919, the last of four children born to Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrant parents.
[Staff. A COMMUNITY OF SCHOLARS: The Institute for Advanced Study Faculty and Members 1930-1980 , p. 429. Institute for Advanced Study, 1980. Accessed November 22, 2015. "Weber, Joseph 55f, 62-63, 69-70 M(NS), Physics Born 1919 Paterson, NJ."] His name was "Yonah" until he entered grammar school.
He had no birth certificate, and his father had taken the last name of "Weber" to match an available passport in order to emigrate to the US. Thus, Joe Weber had little proof of either his family or his given name, which gave him some trouble in obtaining a passport at the height of the
red scare.
When he was five he was hit by a bus, and lost the ability to talk. After learning how to talk again, his Yiddish-influenced accent was gone and had been replaced by the middle-American diction of his speech therapist.[ Making Waves | Terp Magazine - University of Maryland]
Early education
Weber attended Paterson public schools (and the Paterson
Talmud Torah),
graduating at sixteen from the "Mechanic Arts Course" of Paterson Eastside High School in June 1935.
[ "Scientist Scorching for Evidence of Gravity Waves Attended School Here", The News, October 3, 1963. Accessed March 23, 2021, via Newspapers.com. "The search for them is being conducted from an isolated underground structure at the university by Dr. Joseph Weber, a former Patersonian and graduate of Eastside High School."] He began his undergraduate education at
Cooper Union, but to save his family the expense of his room and board he won admittance to the United States Naval Academy through a competitive exam. He graduated from the Academy in 1940.
Naval career
He served aboard US Navy ships during World War II, rising to the rank of lieutenant commander. Weber was the Officer of the Deck on the USS
Lexington when the ship received word of the attack on
Pearl Harbor. In the Battle of the Coral Sea his carrier sank the Japanese aircraft carrier
Shōhō and was in turn mortally damaged on May 8, 1942. Weber often regaled his students with the story of how the
Lexington glowed
incandescent as she slipped beneath the waves.
Later, he commanded the Submarine chaser SC-690, first in the Caribbean, and later in the Mediterranean Sea. In that role, he took part in the invasion of Sicily at Gela Beach, in July 1943.[ U. S. Naval Academy Class of 1940 Archive. Retrieved on 2015-02-24.]
He studied electronics at the Naval Postgraduate School in 1943-45, and from 1945 to 1948, he headed electronic countermeasures design for the Navy's Bureau of Ships, in Washington, DC.
Early post-naval career; development of the MASER
In 1948, he joined the engineering faculty of the University of Maryland, College Park. A condition of his appointment was that he should quickly attain a PhD. Thus, he did his PhD studies, on microwave spectroscopy, at night, while already a faculty member. He completed his PhD, with a thesis entitled
Microwave Technique in Chemical Kinetics, from The Catholic University of America in 1951. Building on his naval expertise in tube microwave engineering, he worked out the idea of coherent microwave emissions.
[ American Institute of Physics Oral History Interview with Joseph Weber in 1983] He submitted a paper in 1951 for the June 1952 Electron Tube Research Conference held in
Ottawa,
[ Innovation Hall of Fame] which was the earliest public lecture on the principles behind the
laser and the
maser. After this presentation,
RCA Corporation asked Weber to give a seminar on this idea, and Charles Hard Townes asked him for a copy of the paper.
Townes was working along similar lines, as were
Nikolay Basov and Aleksandr Prokhorov.
[ Charles H. Townes – Nobel Lecture] Although Weber was jointly nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1962 and 1963 for his contributions to the development of the laser,
it was Townes, Basov, and Prokhorov, who received the 1964 Nobel Prize, "for fundamental work in the field of quantum electronics, which has led to the construction of oscillators and amplifiers based on the maser–laser principle."
Work on gravitational wave detection
His interest in general relativity led Weber to use a 1955–1956 sabbatical, funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship, to study gravitational radiation with John Archibald Wheeler at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ and the Lorentz Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands.
At the time, the existence of gravitational waves was not widely accepted. In 1957 he attended a conference where
Richard Feynman described the sticky bead argument, a thought experiment about how to detect these waves.
[ The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory and the First Direct Observation of Gravitational Waves] Weber then published his first paper on how to build a gravity wave detector in 1959, followed by a second paper the year after, and in 1961 he joined the physics department at the University of Maryland as a full professor, where he the same year set about developing a gravitational wave detector.
[ Joseph Weber | Physics Today - AIP Publishing]
His first detector (Weber bar) became operational in 1965, and he began reporting experimental results in 1966.[ February 8, 1967: Joseph Weber submits first gravitational wave paper to PRL]
In 1972, he sent a gravitational wave detection apparatus to the Moon (the "Lunar Surface Gravimeter," part of the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package) on the Apollo 17 lunar mission.[ Lunar Surface Gravimeter]
Claims of gravitational wave detection discredited
In the 1970s, the results of these gravitational wave experiments were largely discredited, although Weber continued to argue that he had detected gravitational waves.
[ Early days in the Sociology of Gravitational Waves] In order to test Weber's results,
IBM Physicist
Richard Garwin built a detector that was similar to Joseph Weber's. In six months, it detected only one pulse, which was most likely noise.
[Marcia Bartusiak, Einstein's unfinished symphony, Joseph Henry Press, 2000, p. 102] David Douglass, another physicist, had discovered an error in Weber's computer program that, he claimed, produced the daily gravitational wave signals that Weber claimed to have detected. Dr. Weber had allowed for noise with random amplitude, but he had not allowed for random phase. Because of the error, a signal seemed to appear out of noise. Garwin aggressively confronted Weber with this information at the Fifth Cambridge Conference on Relativity at MIT in June 1974. A series of letters was then exchanged in
Physics Today. Garwin asserted that Weber's model was "insane, because the universe would convert all of its energy into gravitational radiation in 50 million years or so, if one were really detecting what Joe Weber was detecting." "Weber," Garwin declared, "is just such a character that he has not said, 'No, I never did see a gravity wave.' And the National Science Foundation, unfortunately, which funded that work, is not man enough to clean the record, which they should."
In 1972,
Heinz Billing and colleagues at Max Planck Institute for Physics built a detector similar to Weber's in an attempt to verify his claim but found no results.
In 1987, Weber lost his primary funding after Garwin wrote letters to the National Science Foundation where he suggested they should stop funding the project. For the rest of his life, he continued his research by raising funds on his own.
[ The Man Who Might Have Won a Nobel Prize][ Excerpt from ]
Discovery of gravitational waves by LIGO
On February 11, 2016, the
LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration teams held a press conference to announce that they had directly detected gravitational waves from a pair of black holes merging, on
Rosh Hashanah 2015, (Weber's yahrtzeit), using the Advanced LIGO detectors.
During the announcement, Weber was credited by numerous speakers as the founder of the field, including by
Kip Thorne, who co-founded LIGO and also devoted much of his career to the search for gravitational waves. Later, Thorne told the
Washington Post, "He really is the founding father of this field."
Weber's second wife, astronomer
Virginia Trimble, was seated in the front row of the audience during the LIGO press conference. In an interview with
Science afterwards, Trimble was asked if Weber really saw gravitational waves, to which she replied: "I don't know. But I think if there had been two technologies going forward they would have pushed each other, as collaborators not as competitors, and it might have led to an observation sooner."
Work on neutrino detection
In the course of defending his work on gravitational wave detection, Weber began related work on
neutrino detection. Assuming infinite crystal stiffness, Weber calculated that it could be possible to detect neutrinos using
, and published experimental results on neutrino scattering with these crystals.
Weber also patented the idea of using vibrating crystals to generate neutrinos. His experimental results contradicted previous and subsequent findings from other experiments, but Weber's neutrino theories continue to be tested.
Legacy
Although his attempts to find gravitational waves with bar detectors are considered to have failed, Weber is widely regarded as the father of gravitational wave detection efforts, including
LIGO,
MiniGrail, and several HFGW research programs around the world. His notebooks contained ideas for laser interferometers; later such a detector was first constructed by his former student Robert Forward at Hughes Research Laboratories.
The Joseph Weber Award for Astronomical Instrumentation was named in his honor.
Personal life
His first marriage, to his high school classmate Anita Straus, ended with her death in 1971. His second marriage was to astronomer
Virginia Trimble.
He had four sons (from his first marriage), and six grandchildren.
Joseph Weber died on 30 September 2000 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, during treatment for lymphoma that had been diagnosed about three years earlier.
External links
