Joseph Weber

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For other persons named Joe or Joseph Weber, see Weber.
Joseph Weber
Born May 17, 1919 (1919-05-17)
Died September 30, 2000 (aged 81)
Residence USA
Citizenship American
Fields Physicist
Institutions University of Maryland College Park
Alma mater United States Naval Academy
The Catholic University of America
Known for Weber bars
laser
gravitational wave

Joseph Weber (May 17, 1919 – September 30, 2000) was an American physicist. He developed the first gravitational wave detectors (Weber bars) and first suggested the use of laser interferometry in the field.

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[edit] Early education

Weber graduated from Patterson High School in Patterson, NJ in the midst of the Depression. He began his undergraduate education at Cooper Union, but to save his family the expense of his room and board he gained admittance to the US Naval Academy. He graduated in 1940.

[edit] Naval Career

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). In the Battle of the Coral Sea his carrier sank the Japanese aircraft carrier Shōhō and was in turn fatally damaged. He 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 in the Mediterranean Sea.

After the war, he headed electronic countermeasures for the Navy.

[edit] Early Post-Naval Career; Development of theories leading to 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 at night, while already a faculty member. He received his PhD from The Catholic University of America in 1951. In 1952, he gave the earliest public lecture on the principles behind the laser and the maser, although these ideas were developed simultaneously by Charles Townes, Nikolay Basov, and Aleksandr Prokhorov, who received the Nobel Prize for this work in 1964.

[edit] Detection of gravitational waves

His interest in general relativity led Weber to use a 1955 sabbatical to study gravitational radiation with John Archibald Wheeler at Princeton University. At the time, the existence of gravitational waves was not widely accepted; Weber was the first to make a real attempt to detect these waves. After the publication of his ideas on the detection of gravitational waves in 1960, he moved from the Engineering Department to the physics department at Maryland in 1961.

He developed the first gravitational wave detectors (Weber bars) in the 1960s, and published papers beginning in 1969 showing 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) on the Apollo 17 lunar mission.

[edit] Claims of gravitational wave detection discredited

In the 1970s, the results of his gravitational wave experiments were largely discredited, although Weber continued to argue that he had detected gravitational waves. The process of how physicists and the general public came to reject Weber's claims that he had found gravitational waves is described in several articles and the book "Gravity's Shadow," by sociologist Harry Collins.

[edit] Legacy

Although his attempts to find gravitational waves are now considered to have failed, Weber is generally regarded as the father of gravitational wave detection efforts, including LIGO, MiniGrail, and several HFGW research programs around the world.

The first satellite of the Naval Academy's Small Satellite Program has been named WeberSat-LARES in his honor.

The Joseph Weber Award for Astronomical Instrumentation was named in his honor.

[edit] Personal life

Weber was the youngest of four children born in Paterson, NJ, to Yiddish-speaking parents. His name was "Yonah" until he entered grammer school. He had no birth certificate, and his father had taken the last name of "Weber" to match an available passport in order to emmigrate 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.

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 4 sons (from his first marriage), and six grandchildren.

[edit] References

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