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Originally Posted by Eratosthenes
Surely you are not suggesting that Weber's work was critical to this discovery>? Carving up a bunch of aluminium cylinders that clang together and then calling them Weber Bars just to impress bankers is hardly major progress in this field.
You may owe Kip an apology - he has worked tirelessly over the decades. In fact Kip also looked at the detection of gravitational waves in the 1960s but the technology was not advanced enough at that point in time.
Weber Bars
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You are oblivious to the fact that Weber was the driving force in creating the experimental science behind gravitational waves.
Whereas Einstein described propagating gravitational waves in the arcane mathematical language of time dependent coefficients of the perturbed Lorentz metric, which was cryptic to most people including experimental physicists, Weber showed that if gravitational waves were able to deform an elastic body then it should be possible to drive electromechanical transducers which would provide the signal for the wave's presence.
Your comments on Weber are woefully ignorant and demeaning.
Here is what Kip Thorne had to say about Weber in an excerpt from a Washington Post article after the discovery.
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One of the people who studied under Weber was Kip Thorne, who co-founded LIGO and also devoted much of his career to the search for Einstein’s waves. Thorne came to Washington Thursday to be part of the big announcement — his picture is on our front page today — and he took pains Thursday to credit Weber as an inspiration.
When I asked Thorne after the news conference about Weber’s claims of discovering gravitational waves, Thorne corrected me: He said Weber only claimed to have found evidence for such waves, and didn’t claim an actual discovery.
Perhaps that’s a fine distinction, but let’s move on: Weber also was a pioneer of lasers, and he arguably should have shared in the Nobel Prize for their invention. LIGO is a masterpiece of laser-based science and delicate instrumentation. Keep in mind, the gravitational waves are not detected directly but are inferred through their effects on a split laser beam. The founders of LIGO (including Thorne and Ronald Drever of Caltech and Rainer Weiss of MIT) derived many of their ideas and technologies from Weber’s groundbreaking work.
Thorne told me, “He really is the founding father of this field.”
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...eroes-of-ligo/