MIT Professor Emeritus Rainer Weiss ’55, PhD ’62 was a renowned experimental physicist and Nobel laureate whose groundbreaking work confirmed a longstanding prediction about the nature of the universe. Weiss conceived of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) for detecting ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves, and was later a leader of the team that built LIGO and achieved the first-ever detection of gravitational waves. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for this work in 2017. Together with international collaborators, he and his colleagues at LIGO would go on to detect many more of these cosmic reverberations, opening up a new way for scientists to view the universe.

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