For the pipe-smoking Weiss, the trials and tribulations are proving worth it. Two months ago, he and the Caltech physicists, who are now overseeing the direction of the project, received a multimilliondollar nod to forge ahead with their dream of detecting gravity waves— an unverified, extremely weak form of radiation predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity.
Indeed, at a time when funds seem to be tightening up, the National Science Foundation renewed a commitment to the project and upped the money the plan is approved to receive—to $10.6 million over the next 30 months. And NSF officials are optimistic that the 1990 budget will allocate another $100 million to build the first full-scale gravity wave observatories.
An example of the kind of "big science" project that NSF approves only a few times each decade, the grandiose scheme calls for a huge L-shaped detector on each coast of the United ...
