Rai Weiss

Rai Weiss, born 1932, is a modern day Galileo: that might seem like hyperbole but he was a key player in designing, testing and then building an entirely new kind of astronomical instrument that can unveil aspects of the universe that would otherwise go completely unseen. He shared in the 2017 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, which detected the 2015 collision of two black holes more than a billion miles from Earth. In this podcast, recorded in the rather noisy high bay workshop at MIT, Rai tells how he got started - tinkering with radios and hi-fi’s - and reveals fascinating details of the long decades of work to create LIGO.