Joseph Weber (May 17, 1919 – September 30, 2000) was an American

physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate cau ...

. He gave the earliest public lecture on the principles behind the

laser A laser is a device that emits light through a process of optical amplification based on the stimulated emission of electromagnetic radiation. The word ''laser'' originated as an acronym for light amplification by stimulated emission of radi ...

and the maser and developed the first

gravitational wave Gravitational waves are oscillations of the gravitational field that Wave propagation, travel through space at the speed of light; they are generated by the relative motion of gravity, gravitating masses. They were proposed by Oliver Heaviside i ...

detectors, known as Weber bars.

Early life

Joseph Weber was born in

Paterson, New Jersey Paterson ( ) is the largest City (New Jersey), city in and the county seat of Passaic County, New Jersey, Passaic County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. 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.

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. 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 sub-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 Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly known as Washington or D.C., is the capital city and Federal district of the United States, federal district of the United States. The city is on the Potomac River, across from ...

. He resigned from the navy as a lieutenant commander in 1948 to become a professor of engineering.

Early post-naval career; development of the MASER

In 1948, he joined the engineering faculty of the

University of Maryland, College Park The University of Maryland, College Park (University of Maryland, UMD, or simply Maryland) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in College Park, Maryland, United States. Founded in 1856, UMD i ...

. 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. He submitted a paper in 1951 for the June 1952 Electron Tube Research Conference held in

Ottawa Ottawa is the capital city of Canada. It is located in the southern Ontario, southern portion of the province of Ontario, at the confluence of the Ottawa River and the Rideau River. Ottawa borders Gatineau, Gatineau, Quebec, and forms the cor ...

, which was the earliest public lecture on the principles behind the

and the maser. After this presentation,

RCA RCA Corporation was a major American electronics company, which was founded in 1919 as the Radio Corporation of America. It was initially a patent pool, patent trust owned by General Electric (GE), Westinghouse Electric Corporation, Westinghou ...

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 Nikolay Gennadiyevich Basov (; 14 December 1922 – 1 July 2001) was a Russian Soviet physicist and educator. For his fundamental work in the field of quantum electronics that led to the development of laser and maser, Basov shared the 1964 Nobe ...

and Aleksandr Prokhorov. Although Weber was jointly nominated for the

Nobel Prize in Physics The Nobel Prize in Physics () is an annual award given by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for those who have made the most outstanding contributions to mankind in the field of physics. It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the ...

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 General relativity, also known as the general theory of relativity, and as Einstein's theory of gravity, is the differential geometry, geometric theory of gravitation published by Albert Einstein in 1915 and is the current description of grav ...

led Weber to use a 1955–1956 sabbatical, funded by a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are Grant (money), grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, endowed by the late Simon Guggenheim, Simon and Olga Hirsh Guggenheim. These awards are bestowed upon indiv ...

, to study

gravitational radiation Gravitational waves are oscillations of the gravitational field that travel through space at the speed of light; they are generated by the relative motion of gravitating masses. They were proposed by Oliver Heaviside in 1893 and then later by ...

with

John Archibald Wheeler John Archibald Wheeler (July 9, 1911April 13, 2008) was an American theoretical physicist. He was largely responsible for reviving interest in general relativity in the United States after World War II. Wheeler also worked with Niels Bohr to e ...

at the

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and the Lorentz Institute for Theoretical Physics at the

University of Leiden Leiden University (abbreviated as ''LEI''; ) is a public research university in Leiden, Netherlands. Established in 1575 by William, Prince of Orange as a Protestant institution, it holds the distinction of being the oldest university in the Neth ...

in the Netherlands. At the time, the existence of gravitational waves was not widely accepted. After he began publishing papers on the detection of

gravitational waves Gravitational waves are oscillations of the gravitational field that travel through space at the speed of light; they are generated by the relative motion of gravitating masses. They were proposed by Oliver Heaviside in 1893 and then later by H ...

, he moved from the engineering department to the physics department at Maryland. He developed the first gravitational wave detectors ( Weber bars) in the 1960s, and began publishing papers with evidence that he had detected these waves. In 1972, he sent a gravitational wave detection apparatus to the Moon (the "Lunar Surface Gravimeter," part of the

Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package The Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (ALSEP) comprised a set of scientific instruments placed by the astronauts at the landing site of each of the five Apollo program, Apollo missions to land on the Moon following Apollo 11 (Apollos Apol ...

) on the

Apollo 17 Apollo 17 (December 7–19, 1972) was the eleventh and final mission of NASA's Apollo program, the sixth and most recent time humans have set foot on the Moon. Commander Gene Cernan and Lunar Module Pilot Harrison Schmitt walked on the Moon, ...

lunar mission.

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. In order to test Weber's results,

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

Physicist

Richard Garwin Richard Lawrence Garwin (April 19, 1928 – May 13, 2025) was an American physicist and government advisor, best known as the author of the first hydrogen bomb design. In 1978, Garwin was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering ...

built a detector that was similar to Joseph Weber's. In six months, it detected only one pulse, which was most likely noise. 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 The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...

in June 1974. A series of letters was then exchanged in ''

Physics Today ''Physics Today'' is the membership magazine of the American Institute of Physics. First published in May 1948, it is issued on a monthly schedule, and is provided to the members of ten physics societies, including the American Physical Society. ...

''. 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 The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an Independent agencies of the United States government#Examples of independent agencies, independent agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government that su ...

, 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. Today we might consider the possibility that Dr. Weber caught some particular event of our galaxy's black hole, which event was not repeated. Unfortunately no one seems willing to allow for this and Dr. Weber gets no credit for possibly being the first to detect gravitational waves. Weber himself continued to maintain his gravitational wave detection equipment until his death. Excerpt from

Discovery of gravitational waves by LIGO

On February 11, 2016, the

LIGO The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is a large-scale physics experiment and observatory designed to detect cosmic gravitational waves and to develop gravitational-wave observations as an astronomical tool. Prior to LIG ...

Scientific Collaboration and

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Collaboration teams held a press conference to announce that they had directly detected gravitational waves from a

pair Pair or PAIR or Pairing may refer to: Government and politics * Pair (parliamentary convention), matching of members unable to attend, so as not to change the voting margin * ''Pair'', a member of the Prussian House of Lords * ''Pair'', the Fren ...

of black holes merging, on

Rosh Hashanah Rosh Hashanah (, , ) is the New Year in Judaism. The Hebrew Bible, biblical name for this holiday is Yom Teruah (, , ). It is the first of the High Holy Days (, , 'Days of Awe"), as specified by Leviticus 23:23–25, that occur in the late summe ...

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 ''The Washington Post'', locally known as ''The'' ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'' or ''WP'', is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C., the national capital. It is the most widely circulated newspaper in the Washington m ...

'', "He really is the founding father of this field." Weber's second wife, astronomer

Virginia Trimble Virginia Louise Trimble (born November 15, 1943) is an American astronomer specializing in the structure and evolution of stars and galaxies, and the history of astronomy. She has published more than 600 works in Astrophysics, and dozens of oth ...

, 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 A neutrino ( ; denoted by the Greek letter ) is an elementary particle that interacts via the weak interaction and gravity. The neutrino is so named because it is electrically neutral and because its rest mass is so small ('' -ino'') that i ...

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 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

, 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

. He had four sons (from his first marriage), and six grandchildren. Joseph Weber died on 30 September 2000 in

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, United States, and its county seat. It is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania#Municipalities, second-most populous city in Pennsylvania (after Philadelphia) and the List of Un ...

, during treatment for lymphoma that had been diagnosed about three years earlier.

References

External links

* (Obituary) * (Obituary) * (Obituary) * (Profile) * (Obituary) * *
UNITED STATES NAVAL ACADEMY; SIXTIETH GRADUATION ANNIVERSARY OF THE CLASS OF 1940: Class Individual Biographies: JOSEPH WEBER

Joseph Weber: An Officer and a Gentleman (in German)

Physics World obituary
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Weber, Joseph 1919 births 2000 deaths 20th-century American physicists Jewish American physicists United States Naval Academy alumni Naval Postgraduate School alumni Catholic University of America alumni Fellows of the American Physical Society University of Maryland, College Park faculty Eastside High School (Paterson, New Jersey) alumni Scientists from Paterson, New Jersey Gravitational-wave astronomy Laser researchers Deaths from lymphoma in the United States 20th-century American Jews Military personnel from Paterson, New Jersey