Rainer Weiss

Rainer (Rai) Weiss, professor of physics emeritus at MIT, was a founding member of the LIGO project. He made pioneering measurements of the spectrum of the cosmic microwave background radiation, and then was co-founder and an intellectual leader of the NASA COBE (microwave background) statellite. Weiss also invented the interferometric gravitational wave dectector, and co-founded the NSF LIGO (gravitational-wave detection) Project.