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Apr 25, 2016 · Eager to do microwave research, he turned to the great physicist George Gamow, who had theorized cosmic microwave background radiation — a thermal remnant of the Big Bang, which would provide unprecedented insight into the origin of the universe and which Weber wanted to dedicate his Ph.D. career to detecting.
Joseph Weber was born in Paterson, New Jersey, on 17 May 1919, the last of four children born to Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrant parents. [4] His name was "Yonah" until he entered grammar school. [5] 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.
Feb 12, 2016 · With almost no funding, Weber worked on his devices until he died in 2000 at the age of 81. Gravitational waves are tiny ripples in space and time itself, set off by cosmic cataclysms such as the merger of two neutrons stars or black holes. Such waves stretch and compress space and in the 1950s Weber calculated that he could detect them using ...
- Introduction
- Early Education
- Naval Career
- Early Post-Naval Career; Development of The Maser
- Work on Gravitational Wave Detection
- Work on Neutrino Detection
- Legacy
- Personal Life
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 (Weber bars).
Weber was born in Paterson, New Jersey and attended Paterson public schools (and the Paterson Talmud Torah), graduating from the "Mechanic Arts Course" of Paterson Eastside High School in June 1935, just after his sixteenth birthday. He began his undergraduate education at Cooper Union, but to save his family the expense of his room and board he wo...
He served aboard US Navy ships during WWII, rising to the rank of lieutenant commander. A memorable experience was his service on the "Lady Lex" USS Lexington (CV-2). Weber was the Officer of the Deck on the 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 car...
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...
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 ...
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 sapphire crystals, and published experimental results on neutrino scattering with these crystals. Weber also patented the idea ...
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 c...
Joseph Weber was born in Paterson, New Jersey, on 17 May 1919, the last of four children born to Yiddish-speaking immigrant parents. 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 l...
Weber claimed that his instruments could detect deformations corresponding to 1 part in 1016, a difference of about 1/100th the diameter of an atomic nucleus.Weber was aware of the problems involved in this kind of design. To rule out causes other than gravitational – acoustic, thermal, seismic, etc. – he suspended the cylinder in a vacuum.
Oct 12, 2015 · Joseph Weber's experiments failed to detect gravitational waves, but that doesn't mean they were a failure. ... Gravitational waves are the last great prediction of general relativity to be ...
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Oct 10, 2000 · Oct. 10, 2000 12 AM PT. TIMES STAFF WRITER. Joseph Weber, a prominent UC Irvine professor who spent much of his career chasing after the mysteries of physics and deep space, died Sept. 30 in a ...
