Skip to main content

Joseph Weber, Gravity Waves, and Robert L. Forward

I got to spend a little time today pursuing one of my hobbies, the history of physics.  I had noticed earlier this week that there were three Trimbles all involved in disparately similar activities, Virginia Trimble, astrophysicist, Charles Trimble, GPS inventor and executive, and George Trimble, NASA deputy director of manned spacecraft during the Apollo missions.  For one of the projects I'm working on I was attempting to find out of the three of them were in any way related, either familially, or by career or professional avenues.  I did find out that Virginia and Charles Trimble attended the California Insittute of Technology during the same time period, but that's about it so far.  Today I got sidetracked by the fact that Virginia Trimble,(picture 1) in addition to being featured in Life Magazine[1], and Twilight Zone promotions[2], was married to Joseph Weber[4].


Joseph Weber is shown in picture 2

Although you can read all about him on Wikipedia, I thought I'd include a few of the intereting bits, (to me anyway), here.  Dr. Weber was the first scientist to build a gravitational wave detector.  In 1968 he began to report on data he was accumulating from the detector and in 1969, he reported the first discovery of gravitational waves in Physical Review Letters[3], (open access!).  The results eventually became hotly contested and currently are largely believed to be invalid.  In the process, however, some of the initial ideas for today's gravity wave detectors were worked out.

Weber also presented the first paper detailing the theoretical principles behind masers and lasers[5].  The paper is laid out and communicated in an easily readable fashion with handwritten equations, (picture 3).



Near the beginning of his career, between 1945 and 1948, Dr. Weber headed the Navy's electronic countermeasure design team.

One final note, Dr. Weber had a famous graduate student in Robert L. Forward.  As it turns out, Forward's dissertation involved work on Weber's gravity wave detector.  Forward went on to work at Hughes Research Laboratory where he did further work on a gravity gradient detector.  However, he's probably most widely known as a science fiction author, (picture 4).



References:

1.  Virginia Trimble in Life Magazine
http://books.google.com/books?id=fFUEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA95&pg=PA98#v=onepage&f=true

2.  Virginia Trimble in Twilight Zone promotions
http://martingrams.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-twilight-zone-princess-twilight.html

3.  PRL on graviational wave detection (open access)
http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.22.1320

4.  Joseph Weber on Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Weber

5.  Laser Maser paper, (sadly not open access)
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6811068
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Please leave your comments on this topic:

Popular posts from this blog

The Valentine's Day Magnetic Monopole

There's an assymetry to the form of the two Maxwell's equations shown in picture 1.  While the divergence of the electric field is proportional to the electric charge density at a given point, the divergence of the magnetic field is equal to zero.  This is typically explained in the following way.  While we know that electrons, the fundamental electric charge carriers exist, evidence seems to indicate that magnetic monopoles, the particles that would carry magnetic 'charge', either don't exist, or, the energies required to create them are so high that they are exceedingly rare.  That doesn't stop us from looking for them though! Keeping with the theme of Fairbank[1] and his academic progeny over the semester break, today's post is about the discovery of a magnetic monopole candidate event by one of the Fairbank's graduate students, Blas Cabrera[2].  Cabrera was utilizing a loop type of magnetic monopole detector.  Its operation is in...
1 comment
Read more

Cool Math Tricks: Deriving the Divergence, (Del or Nabla) into New (Cylindrical) Coordinate Systems

Now available as a Kindle ebook for 99 cents ! Get a spiffy ebook, and fund more physics The following is a pretty lengthy procedure, but converting the divergence, (nabla, del) operator between coordinate systems comes up pretty often. While there are tables for converting between common coordinate systems , there seem to be fewer explanations of the procedure for deriving the conversion, so here goes! What do we actually want? To convert the Cartesian nabla to the nabla for another coordinate system, say… cylindrical coordinates. What we’ll need: 1. The Cartesian Nabla: 2. A set of equations relating the Cartesian coordinates to cylindrical coordinates: 3. A set of equations relating the Cartesian basis vectors to the basis vectors of the new coordinate system: How to do it: Use the chain rule for differentiation to convert the derivatives with respect to the Cartesian variables to derivatives with respect to the cylindrical variables. The chain ...
11 comments
Read more

More Cowbell! Record Production using Google Forms and Charts

First, the what : This article shows how to embed a new Google Form into any web page. To demonstrate ths, a chart and form that allow blog readers to control the recording levels of each instrument in Blue Oyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" is used. HTML code from the Google version of the form included on this page is shown and the parts that need to be modified are highlighted. Next, the why : Google recently released an e-mail form feature that allows users of Google Documents to create an e-mail a form that automatically places each user's input into an associated spreadsheet. As it turns out, with a little bit of work, the forms that are created by Google Docs can be embedded into any web page. Now, The Goods: Click on the instrument you want turned up, click the submit button and then refresh the page. Through the magic of Google Forms as soon as you click on submit and refresh this web page, the data chart will update immediately. Turn up the:...
Post a Comment
Read more