Going After Gravity: How A High-Risk Project Got Funded

CAMBRIDGE, MASS.—If Rainer Weiss doesn't reach his goal of staring God in the eye—or at least gazing back to the first moment of creation—it won't be for lack of trying. Over the past 16 years, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist has appeared before a host of committees, flitted between coasts on red-eye flights to meet with collaborators, and even endured what some call a scientific version of a shotgun wedding with rival physicists at Caltech. For the pipe-smo

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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 ...

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